By Marian Weyo @ Shutterstock.com
The learning losses seen among American children after two years of Covid lockdowns are shameful. Sweden took a different approach that saved its students from those problems. At the Cato Institute, Johan Norberg discusses Sweden’s successful navigation of the pandemic. He writes:
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.” 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.”
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.
The government recommended that Swedes engage in social distancing, work remotely, avoid nonessential travel, and stay indoors if they felt sick, but it did not force them to. The Social Democratic Prime Minister Stefan Löfven declared: “We will never be able to legislate about everything. We will never be able to ban all harmful behavior. Now it is actually more a matter of common sense. There is an individual responsibility, and every individual has to take responsibility for themselves, for their fellow people and their country.” Those were concepts rarely heard in other countries at the time.
This does not mean that there were no restrictions in Sweden. The most restrictive was that public gathering and events were limited to no more than 50 participants in March 2020. This included theater, cinema, concerts, lectures, religious meetings, demonstrations, sporting events, and amusement parks, but not workplaces, shopping centers, and private gatherings. In November 2020 this limit was reduced to eight people, then gradually lifted starting in May 2021 until it was fully removed in September 2021.
In April 2020 the government banned private visits to elderly care homes. Bars and restaurants were ordered to offer table service only and the space between tables had to be increased. In November 2020, alcohol sales after 10 p.m. were banned, and by the end of the year, the deadline was advanced to 8 p.m. This rule was terminated in June 2021.
The Public Health Agency of Sweden recommended that secondary schools and universities switch to distance education between March and June 2020, and again in December 2020 until early January 2021, but preschools and elementary schools stayed open throughout that time.
Most countries, including Sweden’s neighbors Norway, Denmark, and Finland, rapidly closed their national borders. Finland even erected internal borders. Sweden’s state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell rejected border closures as being “ridiculous” and unscientific because the virus is already within a country that considers such a step, and restrictions would just hurt the economy.5 Still, when the European Union closed its borders to non‐Europeans in March 2020, being a member of the EU, Sweden had to follow.
Read more here.
If you’re willing to fight for Main Street America, click here to sign up for my free weekly email.
