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So Sweden is still being used in international corona discourse as a kind of Rohrschach ink blot.
In a nutshell, "the Swedish experiment" is probably the ideal response *if* you've taken complete global covid-19 eradication off the table.
Whether it is *right* to do that is another matter. But this insight is why Sweden does not fit into any of the categories international media on one side or another tries to fit it into.
Did Sweden just do nothing and ignore the issue? No. Did they go all out at the beginning to stop the spread? Also no.
Did ordinary Swedes take it upon themselves to stop the spread? Did the authorities advise them to do so? Yes, to some extent, but...
... after about August in my observation most Swedes stopped caring and all you can find are more hand sanitizers stations and less movie seats
... after about August in my observation most Swedes stopped caring and all you can find are more hand sanitizers stations and less movie seats
There has been an uptick in infections in the past few weeks but it has not really been reflected in the ICU and death stats yet, and it's been more than two weeks by now...
When the Swedish authorities announce or threaten a new measure, it is not a sign that "Anders Tegnell is capitulating to reality", Tegnell never argued that there shouldn't be measures or that you'd never apply restrictions.
Most countries, including countries that are failing at it, are taking an implicitly covid-19 eradicationist approach. That includes the USA. The fact that the approach is resisted or misapplied to the point of failure is another story.
There are a few developed wEStErn countries like NZ that have made an eradicationist approach succeed at the expense, mainly, of tourism. So we know that eradicationism *can* work.
The Swedish calculation is that most societies including Sweden do not have the underlying social consensus required to make eradicationism work smoothly. The popularity of a non-eradicationist policy in Sweden is for them the evidence.
What does a non-eradicationist policy look like? For some, it is still a nightmare because it requires the potentially indefinite confinement of some of the vulnerable population. i.e., it can be argued that it is deeply ageist and ableist, for some disability categories.
But on the other hand, and eradicationist policy requires a social consensus that eight weeks of national or global isolated indoors, where there is no significant "cheating", is worth the value of an *inclusive* return to status quo ante.
Insofar as this consensus does not exist in very many "Western" developed countries, an eradicationist policy therefore may risk producing costs that never pay off later (because the virus doesn't go away despite the measures).
Of course, there are many unresolved empirical questions, and there could still be a Swedish second-wave of deaths and ventilations.
Then there is the matter of "long covid" and disability created by the disease whose overall gravity has yet to be assessed.
That leads to the other unspoken conflict, one over philosophies of precaution. Some "eradication advocates" appear to view the issue as a concrete case to try to establish a very specific philosophy of risk and precaution as the standard response to all such crises.
However, this is again deeply political. In other words, the underlying conflict over covid19 and the Swedish model is about how we assess Western societies are able to handle risk and points where social consensus is required.
But we know now that a sufficient proportion of the population does in fact think that a 1% risk of death is acceptable especially if it is not evenly distributed, and that they think that 8 weeks of lost opportunities *are* a worse outcome than a couple of years ...
... off the life of someone else's grandmother.
However, the lost opportunities are not to be trivialized. That is, they can be very consequential if there is no political consensus that the losses should be cured.
However, the lost opportunities are not to be trivialized. That is, they can be very consequential if there is no political consensus that the losses should be cured.
By curing the losses, I mean returning to the distributional status quo ante of opportunities and resources.
