The Patriot Post® · Sweden's Lenient Approach to the China Virus

Despite the ongoing global China Virus pandemic, Sweden’s restaurants, schools, and stores remain open. In the Scandinavian country, there are no nationwide lockdowns or shelter-in-place mandates. Instead, the government has largely taken a much more lenient approach to the virus by encouraging voluntary social distancing and cleanliness habits, while urging those most at risk among the population to self-isolate.

As a result, Sweden’s economy has not taken near the beating that other European nations are now experiencing after implementing more extreme quarantine measures. So, the question everyone is asking is this: Will Sweden’s approach work?

Well, as one would expect opinions are mixed. President Donald Trump certainly doesn’t believe in Sweden’s approach, claiming, “Sweden is suffering very, very badly.” However, on balance, Sweden’s numbers currently aren’t that troubling. Swedish deaths from COVID-19, having just topped 1,000, are higher than its less populated Nordic neighbors but are nowhere near approaching the numbers out of Italy and the United Kingdom.

And regarding Sweden’s higher death toll than other Nordic countries, chief epidemiologist Anders Tegnell argued, “[It’s] partly that we are on different places on the exposition curve, partly that we in Sweden, unfortunately, have had a large spread of contagion in elderly homes, something you have not seen in the other Nordic countries. And this we, of course, continue to analyze — why Swedish elderly homes have been exposed so much compared to other countries. But if we compare Sweden with Belgium, the U.S., and a number of other countries, our death rates are rather low.”

One factor that has many troubled is that Britain initially took a similar approach to the pandemic — with the goal of quickly developing widespread herd immunity — only to reverse course and lock the country down after infections and death rates started to rise. Indeed, after a recent jump in Sweden’s number of COVID-19 deaths, 22 Swedish scientists penned a letter calling on the government to impose strict lockdown measures.

Should Sweden continue its more lenient approach to the pandemic, it may in the end prove to offer valuable data when evaluating what was the best model for addressing the global crisis. But as the old adage states, hindsight is always 20/20.