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Last month things seemed to be going well for Sweden. “Sweden was right,” tweeted high-tech billionaire Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and SpaceX. In his short message, Musk posted a graph with the Swedish krone’s death numbers: after extreme changes in spring, the curve was now just above the zero line.
Like Musk, many thought that the Scandinavian country’s special path would have to pay off this fall. Led by their state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell, the Swedes had been largely confident that they could handle the pandemic with few restrictions: common sense rather than coercion and confinement.
The liberal strategy was watched with awe and celebrated by some around the world. Sweden’s blue and yellow flag is a popular fixture at rallies against German crown policy. The fact that the death rate from Covid-19 had increased many times more in the spring than in neighboring Nordic countries and Germany did not change the expectations that the Swedish model had raised.
