The Swedish experiment is to accept the coronavirus as a problem to be managed, rather than conclusively defeated. But will it mean more deaths?
It’s understandable that people have strong reactions to Sweden’s experiment. After all, every fight we have over how some other country has been handling this crisis is a fight we’re having with ourselves about how to handle it.
To start with, it’s a myth that Sweden is doing nothing about the virus. Most Swedes have changed their habits a lot. Schools for older kids are closed, as are universities. People are working from home, when they can, and the elderly are being urged to keep to themselves. Gatherings of over 50 people are prohibited, and ski resorts are closed. Restaurants and bars are allowing table service only, and grocery stores are installing glass dividers between customers and cashiers.
With these premises in mind, Sweden has pumped the brakes instead of slamming on them. You close school for older kids, but you keep grade school going, because evidence so farthat younger children are not a major cause of transmission for the novel coronavirus. You prohibit standing room and shoulder-to-shoulder seating in popular bars and restaurants, but you allow them to keep operating with greater space between tables and customers.
The question, then, isn’t whether Sweden is going to see more deaths from the coronavirus in the short term than it would with a total lockdown. It obviously will. The question is whether it’s going to see exponentially more cases. So far, that hasn’t happened. With unchecked spreading of the virus, a country could expect to see a mortality rate that was 10 or 100 or 1,000 times higher than that of a country with strict controls in place.
An imperfect but useful analogy is to the highway speed limit. Set it to 10 miles per hour, and you might save a lot of lives, but at a huge cost to efficiency and sanity. Set it to something a bit higher, like 40 miles per hour, and you could still save three quarters of those lives but still allow a semblance of normal transit to continue. In this analogy, most of the world has lowered the speed limit to 10 miles per hour. It saves lives, but people won’t tolerate it for long.
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