‘It’s been so, so surreal.’ Critics of Sweden’s lax pandemic policies face fierce backlash: Tegnell has said repeatedly that the Swedish strategy takes a holistic view of public health, aiming to balance the risk of the virus with the damage from countermeasures like closed schools. The goal was to protect the elderly and other high-risk groups while slowing viral spread enough to avoid hospitals being overwhelmed. Protecting the economy was not the aim, he says. (Initial data suggest Sweden’s economy contracted about as much as its immediate neighbors’ as exports and consumer spending dropped.)
Sweden’s light approach is more sustainable than the harsher methods used in other countries, Tegnell also argues. He regrets the death toll in nursing homes, he told Science, and says Sweden should have made it easier financially for caregivers to stay home. “It was a very bad situation for a month,” he says, “but after that it changed completely.” Once strong restrictions were in place, transmission in nursing homes “became lower than in the community.” Tegnell has also said he suspects the number of infections and deaths in other countries will eventually match Sweden’s. Einhorn finds this absurd: “If Norway ever catches up to Sweden in the proportion of people killed by COVID-19,” she says, “I’ll eat my hat.”
