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Critics have called it nonsense: Such a solution will allow the virus to spread much faster than elsewhere and will kill tens of thousands. Hospitals will become a battlefield.
As Sweden was two weeks behind the UK in terms of the spread of the epidemic, most British experts said that we would pay for our choice when the curve peaks. Come back in two weeks, they told me. We will see what you say then,
So here I am, writes Swedish economist Fredrick Eriksson in an article for the British conservative magazine The Spectator.
Happily I can say that the fears were not justified. But Sweden is still under pressure to change tactics. However, we do not. We are careful, sitting at home much more than usual. But schools and stores remain open.
Unlike other countries on our continent, nobody reviews our documents when we leave the city. The police are not preventing us from asking why we spend so much time outdoors, even the authorities encourage it. No one checks your basket to make sure you buy only the essentials.
The State Department of Public Health and Chief Epidemiologist Anders Tegnel remain calm and have yet to recommend closing anything. Scientists and scientific model makers criticize them, but the department prefers to focus on its own calculations of how the virus can spread and what kind of workload hospitals expect.
The government continues to heed the department’s advice, and none of the opponents advocate strict isolation. And opinion polls show that Swedes strongly support the country’s liberal approach to the pandemic.
So why hasn’t Sweden changed its tactics to deal with the pandemic? “The evil that exists in the world is almost always the result of ignorance,” writes Albert Camus in Plague, a book that ominously describes a person’s suffering when illness invades society.
And recently, scientists and observers have dared to give that explanation: perhaps Sweden refuses to be like everyone else, simply because Tegel and his team are just a gathering of ordinary people?
A group of 22 scientists raised this allegation last week in an article in the Dagens Neuter newspaper, calling on the government to curb allegedly ignorant officials at the public health department.
Last week, the British Daily Telegraph raised the same issue, extending the issue of reasoning to the majority of the country’s population: the Swedes were duped by ignorant authorities and the country’s leading epidemiologist, blinded by their sudden glory. Our faith in government is so great and our capacity for disagreement is so small that we even consider that criticism of the authorities is “a shameful betrayal of national efforts.”
A French television journalist I spoke to on Sunday confessed a little embarrassed: “I have a feeling that we almost want Sweden to fail, because then we will know that something is wrong with you and not with us.”
But there is a simpler explanation: Sweden adheres to its policy because it is generally balanced and effective. So far, actual developments are generally in line with government forecasts. By Monday, 1,580 people had died and tested positive for Covid-19.
The number of daily deaths remains fairly stable for some time, but is now gradually decreasing. Many more people will die in the coming weeks and months, but their number will be far from the pessimistic and alarmist forecasts that suggested that 80 to 90,000 people would die in the summer.
There are encouraging signs that the number of reported cases of infection is slowly declining, both in Stockholm (by far the most affected region) and in the rest of the country. According to estimates by the Ministry of Public Health, around 100,000 people will go to hospitals with a positive COVID-19 test. Now there are around 14,800, which means that our situation is more or less in line with these calculations, and perhaps even better.
Perhaps the situation in our hospitals and intensive care units plays a bigger role. Ultimately, the primary goal of infection prevention policy is to try to avoid overloading hospitals with patients who cannot be adequately cared for due to a lack of intensive care staff, equipment, and facilities.
These Swedish experts, who created models based on the Imperial College approach, suggested that there would be between 8,000 and 9,000 intensive care patients per day with peak demand. But the real numbers tell us something completely different. Yes, the situation is very tense, but fortunately the growth in the number of intensive care patients has started to slow down markedly, and today their number remains roughly the same.
We already have approximately 530 patients in intensive care units across the country, and the potential of our hospitals is double and amounts to approximately 1,100 beds. In Stockholm, there are now an average of 220 critically ill patients in intensive care units, which means that hospitals are not overloaded, their potential will be enough for another 70 people.
Stockholm also reports that the city has several hundred hospital vacancies and people can feel free to seek help if they feel sick. In addition, a new temporary ward has been opened in Stockholm to accept patients for hospital and intensive care, and some say that patients should start arriving there two weeks ago. There are none yet.
Sweden does not say it has won a victory, it is far away. The pandemic is just beginning, no one knows exactly how the virus will spread after the restrictions have been lifted and what increased mortality it will eventually lead to when it ends.
Sweden does not know the size of its entire iceberg: how many people infected with the virus have had it with mild or no symptoms. For at least a few weeks, it will be unclear whether herd immunity has developed at least to some extent in some regions of Sweden (especially Stockholm).
Recent tests by the Carolingian Institute have shown that 11% of Stockholm’s population has antibodies against the virus. Professor Jan Albert, who performed these tests, says that, in fact, this number is probably higher and may be much higher. So far, they have tested only a few blood donors who can donate blood only if they are healthy and have no symptoms.
Albert believes the current situation is far from the rough estimate suggested by Professor Tom Britton in a study published this weekend. He suggested that between 25% and 40% of Stockholm’s population had already had the virus and that the region would have collective immunity by the end of May.
These results are encouraging, although so far they are only an observational evaluation, not a validated reality. They will not affect Swedish politics in the near future. In fact, all this uncertainty about the development of the pandemic was in part the reason why Sweden chose a liberal approach. We need to plan so that the strict rules of social distance can work for a long time and this will not work if they are stricter than necessary.
Countries like Austria and Denmark are now beginning to ease the restrictions, and the virus is still spreading there, albeit at a slower rate than before. Once the restrictions are completely removed, they may need to be re-entered to control further outbreaks of the virus.
No European country has yet discovered what policy to implement to analyze and track the spread of the disease on a large scale. We don’t know when the vaccine will be ready. For the foreseeable future, each country’s protection framework against the virus must be a strict social distance.
However, the Swedish authorities have proposed a liberal approach based on individual responsibility, because people will last longer and because it has the effect of “smoothing the line”.
There are more important reasons for this. The restriction policy violates fundamental civil liberties: in Sweden these freedoms, with some exceptions, have been left intact. Self-isolation policies have a great impact on public health. And they do great harm to the economy.
Sweden is no exception: Our economy has been falling like a rock for the past month. In the city where I live, in Uppsala, you can now see bankruptcy reports in the windows of many stores, and every day I hear from my friends and acquaintances who have lost their jobs or small businesses. Domestic production also decreased because world trade stopped.
Industrial giants like ABB and Sandvik continue to operate, but cannot ship their products to other countries. Automakers like Volvo and Scania decided to close their plants in early March because they were no longer able to receive parts from other countries.
So everyone was ready for the grim economic news when the government announced a new budget last week. However, it still made a grim impression. According to the reference scenario, our national production will decrease by 4% this year, which will cause unemployment to reach 9% and the budget deficit to 3.8% of gross domestic product.
The only consolation is that it could have been worse. We are quite far from the level of economic recession that the most closed countries predict. In fact, the economic situation in Sweden seems incredibly positive compared to the terrifying reports and scenarios elsewhere.
For example, cash flow figures show that personal consumption in Denmark and Finland fell by 66% and 70% respectively, while in Sweden it decreased by less than 30%. Unemployment in Norway has increased considerably and continues to rise four times faster than in Sweden.
The budget deficit in the UK and the US is likely. USA Be between 12% and 15%. The economic scenario presented last week by the Budget Committee estimates that UK GDP may decline by almost 13% this year.
So yes: a pandemic needs to balance its impact on the economy if we want the restraint regime to last more than a few weeks. No country can bear such repressive measures if they have such catastrophic consequences for its economy.
Many countries can now borrow money to pay unemployed people and help businesses on the brink of bankruptcy. But you cannot do this incessantly. Accumulated debts now must be paid later. We can expect a vigorous economic recovery, but it is likely to be slow and take years to restore national production.
And we already know what that means: unemployment will remain high, people will be impoverished and the cost of benefits, social services and basic public services, such as the police, will be reduced. Sweden cannot avoid this either, but our economy will not be as devastated as the economies of other countries.
So Sweden is in no rush to close. Tegel’s team is also not scared and does not fight for its reputation. Most people believe that Sweden has chosen a balanced and effective policy and current trends support this view. Everyone is very upset about the lack of care for the elderly in nursing homes, as most people die there.
It is also sad that the emergency plan was so bad and the urgent drug supplies are too small. Some will be responsible. Heads will fly. But, I don’t think this affects Tegel.
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