Sweden was hailed as a shining light of Covid policy response without lockdowns until it wasn’t. Then it was again, but it isn’t now.
It’s as perplexing as flipping through a set of Ikea instructions to assemble your own Large Hadron Collider.
Members of Australia’s commentariat donned the Abba kit, bleached their hair and pined for the fjords. The smart Swedes, the argument went, had chosen to keep their schools, their shops, their cafes and restaurants open. Hooray!
Then a lot of Swedes died. Almost 6000 to date. Per capita that’s not as bad as Spain, Belgium or the UK but we are in the oranges and apples comparative analysis business here. Sweden is not a large international tourist or commercial destination. The capital, Stockholm is not a transport hub. Its airports are not drop off points to the rest of Europe and beyond. Better to compare it to its Scandinavian neighbours who as of Sunday had recorded 278 deaths (Norway), 346 (Finland) and 686 (Denmark).
The no lockdown caravan moved on to other parts of the world. Spinning a globe, index fingers waved around all parts desperately searching for answers. Japan became a model. South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong. More recently eyes have turned to Africa. Many of us despaired at the thought of the pandemic hitting the continent hard but to date, mercifully it hasn’t happened.
Forget lockdowns for a moment. What is common to these countries, these parts of the world is that they have experience of other pandemics in recent times. SARS in South East Asia. Ebola in Africa. Lessons have been learnt. Safer behaviours acquired – people had learned the benefits of rigorous personal hygiene, mask wearing, social distancing and in the case of Africa, stopped fiddling about with their dead grandpas.
The herd immunity debate
But eyes turned again to Sweden when its numbers of daily recorded cases plummeted and nudged zero. All without lockdowns. Some claimed Sweden had hit herd immunity. But its recorded cases to date – 106,380 in a population of 10.1 million are a mile away from hitting the anticipated 70 per cent immunologists claim is the figure for COVID herd immunity.
Perhaps these commentators forgot that with every first wave there must come a second. Sweden’s recorded cases are back up, not quite as high as they were in the dark days of April and May but up around 600 new cases a day.
None of this comes as a surprise. In these days of pandemic where expertise should be given the highest regard, we have instead had to endure commentators hawking pharmaceuticals to the general public without so much as a whisper of a disclaimer. The federal member for Hughes, former furniture salesman Craig Kelly, has left an eternal record in Hansard where he recommended the drug be made available to Australians with Covid or without despite overwhelming clinical evidence that it a) provided no benefit, b) posed a risk of heart arrhythmias and in rare cases caused, C) death.
This is the sort of stuff that would have brought a gleam to Pol Pot’s eye. People without qualifications, clinical skills, or relevant expertise pretending they and only they know what’s best for us.
If Kelly et al won’t offer a disclaimer, I will. Get your drug treatments from qualified experts — pharmacologists, virologists, respiratory medical specialists, cardiologists, even your general practitioner. And they won’t try and flog you an ottoman in brown suede at the same time. It’s a win-win.
Sweden switches gears
But back to Sweden where the public health response to the pandemic has changed. Lockdowns are now a possibility in Sweden. Uppsala, a university city some 70 kilometres north of Stockholm has experienced high numbers of recorded cases and may well be the first in Sweden to be locked down.
And with that the commentariat caravan moved on again.
But I think it should stay and have a good look around because Swedes might just have found the right balance. The changes in policy give local authorities the power to recommend that people avoid normally crowded public places. Swedes may also be asked to avoid public transport and stay away from those considered most vulnerable. At very worst a regional short-term lockdown might be put in place.
The key word is ‘recommend’
The model is based closely on the Norwegian one but in Sweden, the key word is “recommend”. There are no fines. No ugly summons to court. No long-term lockdowns with the strong whiff of the jack boot resonating. We have seen this response in all states and territories and most disturbingly in Victoria.
The Swedes will not bring in sweeping curfews. What possible benefit could that offer other than an easy way for a police force to assert itself? When asked about who recommended a curfew in Melbourne, everyone from Dan Andrews down made their best po faces. It seemed no one recommended it but there it was.
We know that lockdowns are disastrous for economic activity and should be avoided at all costs but there is a solid argument to be made that the virus itself is the sharpest handbrake on economic activity. Consumers won’t consume or not as much as they used to. Big purchases are deferred. We saw this in a study taken across Denmark which was in lockdown and Sweden which wasn’t. In Denmark consumer spending reduced by 29 per cent. In Sweden it was 26 per cent. Without lockdowns, the Swedish economy has still been hit hard. Its central bank growth forecasts are as bad as you’ll see anywhere in Europe.
What the new, improved Swedish Covid model offers is a lighter touch. It will use information and to seek to engage communities so people can make their own plans. It relies on that great cornerstone of sensible state and public discourse – informed choice.
All eyes have been on Sweden since the pandemic first hit. There have been a lot of column inches written about the Swedish response, most of them nonsense. But now maybe the Swedes having learned from their mistakes are showing the rest of the world how to go about.
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