Assuming that the pandemic will at some point end, people will look back and judge their governments’ response.
Since Descartes postulated that all knowledge is comparative, that judgement will inevitably necessitate a search for comparators, and here the example of Sweden will prove invaluable.
After all, most European countries have handled coronavirus in roughly the same manner. Lockdowns, curfews, confinement to quarters, closures of most businesses are common features, as are the disastrous economic consequences of such measures.
Exactly how disastrous, we don’t know yet. But there’s no conspicuous reason to be optimistic: it will take at least a generation for things to get back to normal, and they may actually never do so.
Since all of us are affected, I shan’t upset you any more than you are already by mentioning some of the lurid details of the likely catastrophe, not just economic, but also social and political. Yet here too most European countries are in the same boat, and the vessel resembles the Titanic more than Noah’s Ark.
Sweden, as you know, is an exception. She staged an experiment, thereby kindly giving us grounds for comparison. Her economy won’t collapse because the government has kept it going throughout the pandemic.
People have been going to work, paying those exorbitant prices in bars, eating in restaurants, having parties – and dying. Surely whatever comparisons will be made in the future will have to take the death statistics into account.
The most valid comparisons will be those drawn between Sweden and the countries that have similar demographic, meteorological, social, cultural and economic conditions. In other words, Denmark and Norway (and to a lesser extent Finland and Iceland).
This is how the pandemic markers have been evolving in Scandinavia. On 21 March, Sweden had 2.3 times fewer cases than Norway. On 2 May, Sweden had a third more. During the same period, Sweden started out having a third fewer cases than Denmark and ended up with more than a quarter more.
At the beginning of that period the mortality rate in Sweden was approximately 1.5 times higher than in Norway; at the end, it was almost seven times higher. Compared to Denmark, Sweden’s mortality rate was 13 per cent lower in March and more than three times higher in May.
(In Finland the mortality rate is 6.7 times lower than in Sweden; in Iceland, nine times lower.)
Adjusting the numbers for population density won’t be much help. True enough, Sweden, at 22.5 people per square kilometre, has a slightly higher density than Norway (17). Yet in Denmark the density is much higher still (133.9).
Translating proportions into absolute numbers, had Sweden adopted the same restrictive measures as her Scandinavian neighbours, she would have already saved about 2,000 lives up to now, and the pandemic is still going strong.
In other words, the Swedish experiment came with a price attached, payable in human lives. That doesn’t mean that the Swedes got it wrong. Such a conclusion would be too straightforward, and nothing about this pandemic is.
There was a Cartesian exercise involved, with the credits weighed against the debits. The Swedes decided that keeping the economy healthy and the people free was worth thousands more dead. Other Europeans decided it wasn’t.
Now imagine yourself as a European prime minister. Would you be prepared to tell the people that the cost of letting them get on with their lives as normal will run to thousands of casualties?
How many thousand, you don’t know. May be ten, may be a hundred, may be considerably more. Yet you, taking advantage of your constitutional mandate, have decided this price is worth paying. Our prosperity and civil rights are too precious to sacrifice for a paltry [insert the likely number] deaths.
Would you be ready to do this? Knowing in advance that you’ll be blamed in any scenario other than a Sweden-style experiment coming relatively cost-free? Would you be prepared to face hundreds of thousands of bereaved relations, weeping and wailing and baying for your head?
Would I? I wish I had the moral certainty of some of our columnists. But I don’t, so I think I’ll stay on the fence in this one. And I certainly don’t envy those who didn’t have that luxury, including our own much maligned government.
Grandma might die. I could not live with myself if grandma died.
It has indeed been an unenviable choice for whoever had the misfortune to be in government when the music suddenly stopped (as it were).
After the best analysis and projection, one might be certain that the long term cost in lives from the damage to the economy due to a couple of months or more of ‘lockdown’ would make the final death toll at least equal to or worse than the Swedish policy of advising only voluntary self protection from infection. But how many voters, and the journalists who think their job is to scare them, would be prepared to go with you on that one?
Perhaps one depressing aspect of our current experience is that politicians serve up platitudes and deceits because they think that’s the only way to be elected. Perhaps they’re right. And if that is so, the electorate can hardly complain if, when they really need it, their politicians don’t dare to spell out a hard truth and then act upon it.
Whether or not Sweden’s leaders have made the right call, their unwavering courage at this bleak time deserves a cheer from the rest of us.
I agree: what they did took the kind courage politicians tend to lack nowadays. But facts don’t support the widespread view that downturns in the economy cost lives. For example, mortality went down during the Great Depression, and no subsequent recession produced casualties. It’s the people’s standard of living that will suffer, not their physical survival. By far the greater price will be paid in civil liberties. Government tend not to relinquish the powers they claim, not all the powers at any rate. And unlike the economy, power is a zero sum game: the more of it does the state have, the less we do.
“… it will take at least a generation for things to get back to normal, ” historically, what we consider normal is but a small blimp in the long span of time. The new-normal is being shaped… “we battle not against flesh and blood but against spiritual forces in dark places”.
You have to slice the data a lot finer than that in order to do national comparisons.
For example, 85% of Swedes live on only 15% of its landmass and Stockholm has a higher population density than London. Norwegian care homes cater for up to 20 residents, the Swedish counterparts, up to 200, and so on…
I don’t think it was Sweden, (following the age old method of shielding the vulnerable whilst allowing a virus to burn itself out in the rest of the population), who was conducting an ‘experiment’. It was western governments who readily decided to follow China’s authoritarianism, panicked as they were by an out of control, hysterical media.
The lack of leadership has been breathtaking.
You are right about there being many factors affecting the statistics of coronavirus. Still, it’s hard to dismiss out of hand the seven-fold difference in mortality rates. Things may even out with the passage of time, but then again, they may not. My point is that the whole issue isn’t as straightforward as we’d like, although I’m generally sympathetic with your take on it.
Ironic that the greatest nanny state in the world “decided that keeping her economy healthy and her people free was worth thousands more dead.” A Protestant atheism married to a non-murderous brand of socialism as the best state concoction in respecting individual liberties? Or coincidence.
Yes, it’s odd to see Sweden coming out for the libertarian cause. I suspect it had more to do with economic considerations than a concern for civil rights. Max Weber certainly would have thought that.