While the British left has criticized the UK’s unfair handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Swedish left has supported a national response that has led to death, ill health, and ruin among many of the most vulnerable groups of the country. By breaking their own values, it has complicated them into the manageable incompetence and moral bankruptcy of the Swedish pandemic response. This has left a stain there that can take many years to remove.
I am writing this in my three bedroom apartment in a city in central Sweden that I have not left since March. As a lecturer at a university in Stockholm, I can do all my work remotely: my teaching, my research and my administrative tasks. If I wanted to, I could also secure all my food and essences online. However, I am not required to stay in my house. Under the limited pandemic restrictions of Sweden, I have been free for the past five months to go and come as I please, jogging in my neighborhood, riding my bike along the lake, and, if I wanted to, visiting cafes, restaurants , pubs and gyms.
Sweden’s pandemic strategy seems to be designed for people like me: relatively young (I’m 35) and healthy members of Sweden’s large middle class who do not use public transport to get to work. It is based on a number of recommendations for public health: work remotely if you can, stay home when you show symptoms, wash your hands regularly, self-isolate when you are sick.
All Swedes are encouraged to follow them. However, it is much easier to do this if you have a spacious flat, a digitized workspace, a secure job and a washbasin nearby. It also helps if you read and understand Swedish well to easily access public information about the disease.
Opt for laissez-faire
Not everyone has been in this position in Sweden. Public transport workers, health workers, taxi drivers and shop assistants cannot work remotely. People in adult flats who fall ill cannot easily self-insulate. Residents in nursing homes cannot stay away from staff who do not protect them. Older immigrants who do not know Swedish had difficulty in accessing public information about the disease in the early weeks of the crisis, when the authorities were slow to release information in languages other than Swedish.
In otherwise heavily regulated Sweden, the authorities have opted for a laissez-faire approach to the pandemic that has shifted much of the responsibility for reducing contamination to individual citizens. However, as has become painfully clear over the past five months, individuals do not have equal means of protecting themselves and others, nor do they have the same risk for the virus.
Carefully, the course of the pandemic has been borne by the poor, the physically weak, the already sick and the elderly. In Stockholm, people in inferior areas are many times more likely to contract and die from the virus than residents in wealthy neighborhoods. People in the service professions are hard hit, as are people with certain immigrant backgrounds, especially those born in Somalia, Syria and Iraq.
The worst hit of all have been the parents of Sweden. In a country of ten million, more than 5,000 people aged 70 or older have died in the pandemic. It is a national tragedy accompanied by horror stories of deaths in nursing homes and of elderly patients receiving lethal injections of morphine and benzodiazepines instead of oxygen. It contrasts sharply with the situation in Sweden’s northern neighbors, where only about 1,200 people have died from Covid-19 out of a combined population of more than 17 million at the time of this writing.
Rapid spread
Other governments might be asked by such figures to change their approach. But Sweden’s left-wing government has dug its heels, even as the country’s death toll has approached 6,000. Minister Stefan Löfven made his views on the matter very clear: “The strategy is good”, he said bluntly in a recent interview with the daily Aftonbladet.
Not refusing the strategy, the Swedish government and the public health authority leading the pandemic response from Sweden have scrambled to shift the blame elsewhere. In the first place, they have established it on nursing homes, which they say do not keep their residents safe from the virus. Yet this is unfortunate because it ignores the complicity of central government agencies in the disaster in the care homes. Among other things, the Ministry of Social Affairs was slow in issuing clear guidelines for care homes and the Minister for Health and Social Affairs, Lena Hallengren, refused care homes from a crisis management exercise in early March. In addition, the Public Health Authority has explicitly downplayed the dangers of working without PPE in nursing homes and advised that Covid-19 would probably be asymptomatic as well as presymptomatic.
