All Lucky and Without Virtue: Sweden’s Coronavirus Reaction

All Lucky and Without Virtue: Sweden’s Coronavirus Reaction

Sweden bets on both the national character and the herd immunity, hoping they will complement each other. Months later, the country has fewer tests and one of the highest case rates.

In the spring, my neighbors here in Sweden had Easter friends and went to restaurants, gyms and swimming pools while my family and friends in Italy could not take a walk around the block without being asked by a police officer. The differences were also extraordinary for someone who, as is often the case with those living in a foreign country, is used to being surprised and aloof.

In Sweden everything was open and functioning as usual. The government had decided not to implement disruptive measures such as closing schools for children under the age of sixteen so that parents could continue to do their jobs. It is recommended that people work from home, but it has never prevented them from going to their offices if they decide to do so. In fact, some were encouraged to show up at work so as not to communicate a sense of urgency. Health workers were only supposed to wear masks and protection when dealing with suspected COVID-19 cases to avoid the spread of panic.

When my friend brought his mother to the hospital with COVID-19 symptoms in April, the health care workers removed their PPE as soon as it was tested negative, despite the high error rate tests. Swedish politicians, public health experts and people I knew explained this approach as the natural response of a country moving towards faith. government trusted people follow the recommendations as if they were laws; people trusted the government to take care of them in the best possible way; politicians trusted experts to come up with the best measures. Everyone was in tune and everyone was believing.

I come from Italy, a country where it is difficult to find two people who agree with each other (to borrow the description of Alexis de Tocquevilles of nineteenth-century France), a country where the government is blamed for the rain. My sense of displacement was deep in those early days of March and April. I could not rejoice in my fate landing in Sweden and being able to enjoy freedom as if there were no pandemic, and not just because my family and friends were on the other side of the wall. Because what I saw around me, in Sweden, was not freedom.

Months later, what I see is still not freedom as I understand it. Instead, Swedes internalize norms and rituals and act as if they were free. The country is famous for its so-called culture of consensus, but people usually start in agreement rather than end there. I argued in Boston Review that this characterizes an organic society, where individual choice and public choice coincide perfectly and opposition is excluded; where twenty eminent scientists can publish one editorial against Swedish access to one of the two main newspapers of the countries and have almost no influence on public debate or politics.

But there is something else I have seen over the last few months: denial. At first this was expected; was the same in Italy, France, the United Kingdom and the United States. Coronavirus was always someone elses virusthe Lombardy virus, Chinese virus, Italian virus. As infections spread, people were caught drawing distinctions: Europe is not China, they said, the United States is not Europe, China is not Italy. Some countries, obviously went the other way and learned from the similarity: Greece, for example, modeled its policy on its Mediterranean neighbor Italy. In Scandinavia, Norway, Denmark and Finland decided to close early, judging that pandemics apparently affect national character, rituals and geography, especially as societies become more interconnected.

But Sweden went its own way. Decided to bet on the national character and immunity of the herd, hoping they would complement each other. The prevailing view was that the virus could function more quickly among those who did not conform to the usual Swedish intergenerational independence, or those who favored crowded places in the forest loneliness and privacy of their docks, but that would help create of an immunity among the largest population. Interviewed by Times Financial in early May, Anders Tegnell, the state epidemiologist and architect of the Swedish approach without blockade, was calm: In the autumn there will be a second wave, he said. Until then, Sweden will have a high level of immunity and the number of cases will probably be quite low.

The virus hit some groups more than others. As in other countries, it hit the old, the weak, the ones with little chance. In Sweden, many migrants and refugees find work in essential jobs such as healthcare and nursing facilities. Without the necessary PPE or the ability to stay home to care for sick family members, they became vectors; they suffer from the greatest risk of contracting the virus themselves as they continued to interact with colleagues at work without providing masks. Testing has never been the default option in Sweden, even for healthcare workers. According to Our world in data in mid-june at the height of its testing efforts Sweden was administering only twenty-seven tests per 1,000 people, compared with 180 in Iceland, ninety-eight in Denmark and forty-seven in Norway.

Result? A disease that was still spreads in Sweden at the end of June, even as it had been contained elsewhere. The new seven-day country average on June 25 was 1,275 cases per day, compared with forty-two in Denmark and eleven in Norway. That number has dropped since then, but so has testing, which was drastically limited in early July. And the dead remain dead. As for August 25th, COVID-19 had already killed fifty-seven out of every 100,000 Swedes, compared to fifty-four out of 100,000 in the United States, eleven out of every 100,000 in Germany, and two out of every 100,000 in Greece.

Faced with this grim picture, Tegnell continued to defend the Swedish approach, only admitting that things went worse than he had hoped. This was the same expert who claimed to all together base his policies on scientific evidence and mathematical models. It turned out that he just banked on luck and lost. If we were to face the same disease again, knowing exactly what we know about it today, he told Swedish Radio on June 3, I think we would decide to do something between what Sweden did and what the rest of the world has done. . He insisted that the basic strategy was sound, although there was potential for improvement, adding that while other countries introduced many measures at the same time, not knowing which one would work, Sweden had the right to conduct its own experiment. . Otherwise, Tegnell insisted, you do not know which of the measures you have taken has had the best effect. It was left to Jimmie Kesson, the leader of the far-right nationalist Swedish Democrats, to express his surprise. For months critics have been constantly fired, wrote Kesson on Twitter. Sweden has done everything right, the rest of the world has done it wrong. And now suddenly this.

Failure to access Tegnells is not really a matter of bad luck. If anything, Sweden was far away lucky than Italy, Spain or Germany. The virus arrived in the country relatively late. The Swedes had ample opportunity to prepare and take steps to curb its spread. They had three excellent assets of time, money, and organizing tools that they could have used to collect PPE, establish treatments and quarantine, and test, track, and treat as advised by the World Health Organization. They had knowledge and expertise in shovels and had a trustworthy and obedient people. Perhaps most importantly, they had the example of other places to learn. If Sweden did not see Italy as the epicenter of the crisis in Europe as a useful model, it could have used Denmark, which was blocked early even by acknowledging the uncertainty of such measures. As Danish Health Minister Magnus Heunicke said in March, “We have no evidence that everything we do is working.” But we prefer to take a step too far today than discover in three weeks that we have done very little. Instead the Swedish government decided to do almost nothing and only hope for the best.

Niccol Machiavelli, the sixteenth-century Florentine philosopher, described the human condition as dominated by fate (wealth) and virtue (virtThe second, he argued, lies in the loss of the first. The ambiguities of fate should not simply be accepted; they must be known and used. I consider it true that Fortune is the arbiter of half of our actions, Machiavelli wrote in Prince. But it still lets us run the other half, or maybe a little less.