What We Learned From Sweden’s Response To COVID

“Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.”
― Laurence J. Peter, The Peter Principle

Many people have asked why we didn't let the virus hit us like a big wave and get it over with. The Great Barrington Declaration (GBD), a letter penned by three physicians, favored such an approach and called it “focused protection.” It recommended quarantining the highly vulnerable, i.e., the elderly and those with high risk factors like diabetes, heart and lung disease, etc., and letting the virus run amok through the rest of the population to quickly build natural herd immunity across the country. They said we should do away with non-pharmaceutical interventions that prevent infections, such as masks, sanitation, personal distancing, quarantines, closings, etc. The recommendation was published as a letter on October 5, 2020 because no medical journal would accept it as an article. Vaccines were still considered to be months away at that time, but actually began to roll out in mid-December of that year. Admittedly, the letter’s authors did not have a crystal ball.

We didn’t accept that recommendation, but Sweden did something very similar on their own and kept their country open and had considerably less morbidity and mortality than the US. Armchair health experts who learned their subjects at Google and Facebook Universities have been clucking their tongues and scolding the CDC and public health professionals ever since. Should we have responded like Sweden did? Would it have been better if we had followed the recommendations made in the GBD?

When the declaration came out, it was widely panned as being ridiculous by health experts and organizations around the world. A Yale epidemiologist pointed out that almost half the US population would be considered to have an underlying risk factor for COVID meaning that half the population would have to be quarantined from the other half, not much different from the protective measures already underway at that point. It also would have meant that people at less risk would be exposed to a rather nasty virus. They essentially would be sacrificed to a disease more lethal than any flu we have encountered since 1918. And then there is the problem with long COVID and other morbidities such as an uptick in new onset diabetes in many COVID survivors. Even though kids have a very low level of mortality from COVID, the disease was still much worse than any flu for them and too many of them were hospitalized in serious shape with a malady called multisystem inflammatory syndrome or MIS. This was the sacrifice the folks who proposed the GBD were willing to impose on half the population.

Anyway, this post is supposed to be about Sweden, not the US. Did Sweden’s experiment turn out as positive as many people believe? It depends on which countries you compare it to. Comparing the Swedish experience to that of the US, it seems they did pretty well. They did not shut down and had much less mortality than we did. But is that an accurate apples-to-apples comparison? Sweden is a country of just over 10 million people. Its demographic is much more homogenous than that in the US and it has much less poverty. In the US, COVID hit impoverished and minority populations especially hard. They have fewer medical resources to deal with the disease. In contrast, Sweden does not have such a large minority or poor population and it has cradle to grave social welfare for everyone, including medical care. It does not at all resemble the US.

It is more accurate to compare Sweden to its neighboring Nordic countries with similar populations, demographics, and social welfare, but that also enacted more stringent social controls in response to the pandemic like the US did.

It turns out that compared to other Nordic countries, Sweden fared quite poorly with the highest mortality rate. Sweden had four times the number of COVID deaths compared to many of its neighbors. In particular, it had ten times the COVID death rate of Norway.

What about the economy? Of course the Nordic countries that enforced public and commercial shutdowns suffered significant economic hits like the rest of the world. Importantly, so did Sweden, which kept its economy open. Nevertheless, the country suffered as much economic downturn as its neighboring countries that enforced stricter shutdowns. In fact, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and Development (OECD), of which Sweden is a member, reported that the country actually did markedly worse than Denmark, Norway and Finland. It seems that economic health is not only related to open commerce, but also to the public health of the country. Sick people do not work or venture out to buy things. It seems that public health affects economic health. That was not considered in the GBD, which was concerned about the economic impact of closing down commerce via fiat. They did not consider the economic impact of closing down commerce by hospitalizing so many people.

As these effects of its open policies became clear, Sweden eventually began to enforce greater social restrictions later in the pandemic, but the damage had already been done. The architect behind its initial open policies eventually admitted that things did not work out as planned. And in December 2020, Sweden’s King Gustav publically declared that the government’s approach had failed.

The real lesson from Sweden is that if you keep things open and people get sick, the economy still suffers in a pandemic. As far as the economy goes, it is a case of “damned if you do and damned if you don’t” enforce public restrictions.

And if you don’t, people still get sick and die and dead people stop buying things.

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