Sweden during the Pandemic

Why Was Sweden Different? Sweden During The Pandemic

Johan Norberg

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Sweden stood out from other countries, stubbornly refusing lockdowns, school closures, and mask mandates. This was highly controversial and many outsiders saw it as a dangerous gamble with human lives. From a Swedish perspective, however, it looked like it was other countries that were engaging in a dangerous experiment.

This paper describes Sweden’s policies and the reasons for its choices, and it presents some preliminary conclusions about the results. Sweden’s economy got through the pandemic better than comparable countries, and elementary school students have not suffered learning losses. These benefits do not seem to have come at the expense of human health. Remarkably, total excess deaths were smaller in Sweden than in any other European country during the three pandemic years (2020–2022), and the rate was less than half of America’s. In the absence of strict government control, Swedes adapted their behavior voluntarily.

Sweden was different during the pandemic, stubbornly staying open as other countries shut down borders, schools, restaurants, and workplaces. This choice created a massive interest in Sweden, and never before have the foreign media reported so much about the country. Many outsiders saw it as a reckless experiment with people’s lives. In April 2020 President Donald Trump declared that “Sweden is paying heavily for its decision not to lockdown.”¹ In the New York Times, Sweden’s laissez faire approach was described as “the world’s cautionary tale” and in the same pages Sweden was described as a “pariah state.”²

There remains a popular perception in the rest of the world that Sweden’s strategy resulted in a human disaster, and many people think that Swedish decisionmakers came to regret the strategy and, in the end, adopted lockdown policies similar to those in other countries. This paper dispels those unwarranted assumptions, describes Sweden’s actual pandemic policy, explains why the country followed that course, and presents what we know about the results so far.

The main difference between Sweden’s strategy, which was adopted under a government coalition of the Social Democrats and the Green Party, and that of most other countries, was that it mostly relied on voluntary adaptation rather than government force. The Corona Commission, an independent body formed by the government to evaluate the response, described it thus:

The approach chosen by Sweden was based on voluntary measures and personal responsibility, rather than more intrusive interventions … people have not been forced to the same extent as in many other countries to comply with regulations restricting their personal freedom.³

Swedes experienced a very different pandemic. There was no state of emergency, no curfews, no orders to stay at home or shelter in place. Young Swedes were encouraged to continue with their sports training and events. Schools remained open, and so did offices, factories, restaurants, libraries, shopping centers, gyms, and hairdressers. As a rule, borders were not closed to fellow Europeans and public transportation kept running.

There were no mask mandates and not even a recommendation for the public to use masks—until January 2021, when they were recommended on public transportation during rush hours (7–9 a.m. and 4–6 p.m. on weekdays). While some other governments forced school children to wear face masks, Tegnell even warned against making children wear them, saying that “school is no optimal place for face masks.”⁶

Why Was Sweden Different?

The rest of the world wanted to know why Sweden chose to remain open. Swedes thought that the more pertinent question was: Why did other countries close down? In a span of just two weeks, 80 percent of the Organisation for Economic Co‐​operation and Development (OECD) countries adopted lockdown policies. What set Sweden apart was not some strange, unprecedented experiment, but the fact that Swedes did not suddenly and drastically change course. For decades the World Health Organization had planned for a pandemic, and lockdowns of entire societies were never part of the discussion. Instead, plans focused on protecting the most vulnerable but trying to keep society as a whole up and running. What set Sweden apart was that it stuck to that plan, and from a Swedish perspective, it looked like it was the rest of the world that was engaging in a risky, unprecedented experiment.⁸

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