It was not Sweden that engaged in a reckless, unprecedented experiment, but the rest of the world.
It was not Sweden that engaged in a reckless, unprecedented experiment, but the rest of the world.
I t was an experiment scrutinized and debated by the whole world. While many countries locked down during the pandemic, shutting down workplaces and restaurants, my home country of Sweden stubbornly stayed open. There were no orders to remain at home or shelter in place. Schools, offices, factories, restaurants, libraries, shopping centers, gyms, and hairdressers did not close. There were no mask mandates.
There were some restrictions, but, mostly, the Swedish government just recommended that people engage in social distancing, work remotely, and stay indoors if they felt sick; it did not force anyone to follow this advice. Prime Minister Stefan Löfven declared that we should meet the crisis with common sense and individual responsibility, not government control.
Around the world, this was seen as a reckless gamble with human lives. The New York Times described Sweden as a “pariah state” and a “cautionary tale.” President Trump claimed that “Sweden is paying heavily for its decision not to lockdown” and that “Sweden is suffering very, very badly.”
Considering the amount of attention paid to Sweden during the pandemic, it is strange that there has been so little follow-up. How did the Swedish experiment turn out?
I investigate this in a new study for the Cato Institute: “Sweden during the Pandemic: Pariah or Paragon?” The results do not flatter governments that rushed into lockdowns.
For instance, the global economy was 2.9 percent smaller after 2021 than it had been projected to be by pre-pandemic forecasts; the euro zone was 2.1 percent smaller; and the U.S. economy was 1.2 percent smaller. Meanwhile, the Swedish economy was 0.4 percent larger, even though the Swedish government spent less on mitigating the economic effects of the pandemic than other governments did.
Of more significance for the future is the learning loss in countries where children were not allowed to go to school. For example, the U.S. Department of Education concluded that half of America’s students began 2023 a full year behind grade level in at least one subject. In sharp contrast, Swedish elementary schoolers suffered no learning loss during the pandemic, according to a study in the International Journal of Educational Research.
Covid-era Sweden also seems to have done better than other rich countries on indicators such as suicide and domestic abuse, although the data necessary to make comparisons are difficult to find.
The Swedish model’s detractors would say that all these gains came at a terrible price: the willful sacrifice of health and lives. This is where the data provide the most surprising conclusion: Sweden was an outlier in terms of policy but not in terms of mortality.
By June 14, 2023, Sweden had suffered 2,322 Covid-19 deaths per million people, more than our Scandinavian neighbors, but fewer than southern Europe and the United States (3,332). The comparison of Covid-19 deaths is not simple, since countries have different definitions and some countries did not count deaths outside hospitals. But Swedish authorities counted everyone who died and had tested positive for the virus as a Covid-19 death, even if the cause of death was a heart attack. In effect, Sweden reported many who died with Covid-19, not of Covid-19 — which means that the disparity between its mortality rate and those in southern Europe and the U.S. is even more pronounced than it appears.
When you look at “excess deaths” — defined as the number of deaths compared with a previous period or an expected value — during the three pandemic years, 2020–22, compared with the previous three years, Sweden’s excess-death rate during the pandemic was 4.4 percent higher. Compared with the data other countries have provided, this is less than half of the average European level of 11.1 percent, and, remarkably, it is the lowest excess-mortality rate of all European countries.
There are different ways of adjusting for age and previous trends, and with some methods, Denmark beats Sweden to first place, but all methods show that Sweden had one of the lowest excess-death rates of any country during the pandemic. America’s excess-death rate was more than twice as high.
This is a remarkable finding. Swedes turn out to have adapted their behaviors to the pandemic, just as others did, but in a voluntary way, which gave us opportunities to adjust for individual conditions and needs. Individual responsibility worked.
So it was not Sweden that engaged in a reckless, unprecedented experiment, but the rest of the world, and that experiment turned out to be a disaster: Millions of people were deprived of their freedoms, and children were denied schooling, without a discernible benefit to public health.