Whistling past aTwograveyard Swedish economists explain the country’s pandemic strategy, and why they don’t believe it will benefit the Nordic state in the long run
by Caitlin Rockett
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iving with her parents in their summer home in “the middle of nowhere forest in Sweden” was not what Siri Isaksson expected to be doing right now. She was only going to visit Sweden for four days in mid-March before she took a trip to the U.S. to give some talks — Isaksson, who lives in Norway and is an assistant professor of behavioral economics at the Norwegian School of Economics — but then Norway enacted its lockdown, shutting its borders to the world and forcing Isaksson to make a decision about where she wanted to be: in Norway without her parents, or in Sweden with them. The middle of nowhere Sweden it was. That’s where she is when we connect via Skype. She took her parents from Stockholm to the remote summer home specifically to protect her 70-year-old mother, who has a lung disease.
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Isaksson has, from the beginning, been an outspoken opponent of Sweden’s strategy during the pandemic, a sort of social-distancing lite where most businesses, including schools, stay open, but the government asks the people to please use caution. Masks are not encouraged. While the strategy seems to have garnered wide support from the Swedish citizenry, it’s also created one of the highest death tolls per capita in the world, with almost 40 deaths per 100,000 according to data from Johns Hopkins University. As of May 27, there have been 4,220 COVIDrelated deaths in Sweden. “The Swedish policy is basically trading lives today for speculative lives tomorrow,” Isaksson says. “And I actually don’t know if that’s false. I can’t tell you [whether that’s false] because the idea is that in the fall there’s going to be a second wave and that wave is going to be much harder than the first wave and if we have some immunity in our society, less people are going to die. ... You’re speculating about a second wave, you’re speculating about immunity, you’re speculating about a lot of things. But I can tell you one thing that’s for sure: Those 4,000 people that are dead, they are dead. That’s for sure. They’re not coming back. “I really don’t think it’s morally defensible.” The Swedish model is often described as a plan to develop herd immunity, wherein a large
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enough portion of the population has developed resistance to an infection, either by direct contact with the virus or through a vaccine. But Isaksson says that’s a misunderstanding about the Swedish method, which actually intends to “flatten the curve” of infection. “So our strategy is designed to never … overburden the health care system,” Isaksson says. “And from that perspective we have been successful. Herd immunity is something that comes as kind of a logical consequence because as you have people going through the infection, supposedly they get immunity. Now that’s debatable too. … We don’t know. “Now, why I am critical ... is because if you look at the data, just the data, you have 4,000 dead and you have 2,000 that have been treated in ICU. Now, what that tells me is you have so many people who get infected by this virus who are too fragile, either too old or they have underlying diseases, that you simply can’t put them on a ventilator. This is my talking point: What does it matter that we have capacity in our health care system if we can’t save the lives of those patients?” Recently the Swedish Embassy in Washington, D.C., told NPR that while it’s still “far too early to draw any clear conclusions or comparisons connected to the coronavirus pan-
MAY 28, 2020
see SWEDEN Page 16
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