Sweden’s decision-makers defend the Covid response to the Dublin Conference
Sweden’s attitude to Covid-19 was largely similar to other countries and gave similar results, according to the architect behind the Nordic country’s often controversial pandemic policy.
“We had a virtual lockdown, but with more voluntary action,” Dr Anders Tegnell said at a conference in Dublin.
Sweden’s efforts to limit the virus and reduce the spread were “in line” with other European countries, he said, and resulted in an excess mortality rate that is “almost as low” as that of Ireland.
Sweden was the only Western European country that did not introduce a comprehensive lockdown during the first coronavirus wave in 2020, even though it introduced more restrictions in later waves.
Dr Tegnell said his country’s policies during the pandemic were often flawed, but herd immunity was never their goal.
From the beginning of the pandemic, “we understood that it would be a marathon, not a sprint and that we would not be able to stop this by closing the borders”, said Sweden’s former chief epidemiologist at a conference on Covid-19 results at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI).
When asked why Sweden had performed worse than other Nordic countries, Dr Tegnell described Norway and Finland as “outliers” and said that Sweden was “in the middle of the field” in Europe for excess mortality.
He said that larger economic differences, a higher immigrant population and greater housing density may have led to Sweden having a higher excess mortality rate than its neighbors.
Ireland would probably have done “quite well” in the pandemic without introducing legislative controls, according to Professor Ruairi Brugha of RCSI.
“Remarkably compliant”
Far from being rebellious, he said, the Irish were “remarkably compliant” during the pandemic, with strong public support for infection control measures.
Prof Brugha said that the Irish “beat themselves” last year because of their attitude towards limiting the virus, when now, when I look back, it seems that their approach was the right one.
However, a similar level of social support can not be assumed in a future epidemic and for this reason a civic assembly is needed to start engagement around the possibility of “much worse scenarios”, he warned.
By reviewing Ireland’s performance during the pandemic, Prof Brugha said we were not doing as well as other countries that applied decisive quarantines, such as New Zealand and Australia. “But I do not think we could have introduced border controls because of the realpolitik of where we were, with a land border with another country that did not respond responsibly to Covid.”
He praised the Irish response for making decisions quickly at the start of the pandemic, but then criticized the discharge of elderly patients from hospitals to “poorly staffed” nursing homes without personal protective equipment. In addition, the third wave that occurred during Christmas 2020 represented “a policy failure that resulted in hundreds of unnecessary deaths,” he said.