For at min bog, ”Prisen værd”, ikke skulle blive for lang og for tung at læse, valgte jeg at pille nogle af de mere tekniske kapitler ud. Et af dem kan du – i lettere omskrevet form – læse herunder.
Du kan købe bogen her eller låne den på biblioteket.
Sverige. Fra enfant terrible til glemmebogen
I løbet af foråret og sommeren 2020, blev Sverige af mange set som landet, der lod borgerne dø af COVID-19 i håbet om at opnå flokimmunitet, økonomisk gevinst, eller hvad ved jeg.
Her er fx nogle rubrikker fra amerikanske medier:[1]
- “Why the Swedish Model for Fighting COVID-19 Is a Disaster” (Time, oktober 2020)[2]
- “The Inside Story of How Sweden Botched Its Coronavirus Response” (Foreign Policy, december 2020)[3]
- “Sweden Stayed Open and More People Died of Covid-19, but the Real Reason May Be Something Darker” (Forbes, juli 2020)[4]
- “Sweden Has Become the World’s Cautionary Tale” (New York Times, juli 2020)[5]
- “I Just Came Home to Sweden. I’m Horrified by the Coronavirus Response Here” (Slate, april 2020)[6]
Også Twitter-præsident Donald Trump var efter Sverige og skrev 30. april 2020 i et tweet, at “Sweden is paying heavily for its decision not to lockdown”.[7]
Men efterhånden som tiden gik, og COVID-19-dødeligheden og overdødeligheden i flere og flere lande overhalede svenskernes, døde interessen for Sverige også langsomt ud. Den svenske journalist, Johan Anderberg, beskriver det i sin bog ”The herd”[8] sådan her:
For anyone still interested, the results were impossible to deny. By the end of 2021, 56 countries had registered more deaths per capita from Covid-19 than Sweden.
And when the UK Office for National Statistics updated their figures, it turned out that during the period of just under 18 months between January 2020 and June 2021, Sweden had experienced an excess mortality of minus 2.3 per cent. Together with seven other European countries — including its three Nordic neighbours — Sweden had actually experienced a mortality deficit during the pandemic.
With regard to the restrictions that the rest of the world had put so much faith in — school closures, lockdowns, face masks, mass testing — Sweden had more or less gone in the opposite direction.
Yet these were the results.
There were, of course, other possible ways to measure the ravages of the pandemic: the prevalence of post-viral syndrome in society (commonly referred to as ‘long Covid’); an increased budget deficit; unemployment; and so on.
Yet Sweden couldn’t be said to stand out on the basis of these measures either.
It was beginning to become increasingly clear that the political measures that had been deployed against the virus were of limited value.
But about this, no one spoke.
From a human perspective, it was easy to understand the reluctance to face the numbers from Sweden. For the inevitable conclusion must be that millions of people had lived unfreely, and millions of children had had their education disrupted — all for naught.
Who would want to be complicit in that?
Johan Anderberg beskriver det internationale syn på Sverige. Det er svært for amerikanere, englændere, tyskere, polakker osv. at argumentere for, at Sverige gjorde det helt forkert, når de selv endte med flere COVID-19-dødsfald og/eller højere overdødelighed. Og derfor blev Sverige efterhånden ikke længere fremhævet som skrækeksemplet i disse lande.
Jeg synes ikke vi har haft held med at nå samme erkendelse i Danmark, hvilket bl.a. blev illustreret af at Lone Simonsen, Viggo Andreasen mv. havde behov for at ”tage hjem fra stranden og fare i blækhuset”, for at indgå i en debat om, hvorvidt overdødeligheden i Danmark var en anelse højere eller lavere end i Sverige.
Og det er en skam. For som jeg påpeger i bogen, er der rigtig meget der tyder på, at vi misforstod situationen i Sverige under pandemien. Svenskerne døde ikke pga. manglende nedlukning, men på grund af andre faktorer. Og den svenske Coronakommission konkluderede da også, at de svenske myndigheders fokus på anbefalinger, som folk forventes at følge frivilligt, havde været grundlæggende korrekt, selvom kommissionen også mente, at der skulle have været flere restriktioner i marts 2020 (dog ikke noget i nærheden af de danske restriktioner).[9]
Referencer
Anderberg, Johan. 2022. The Herd: The Story of How Sweden Chose to Handle the Pandemic. S.l.: SCRIBE PUBLICATIONS.
Coronakommissionen Sverige. 2022. “Sverige under pandemin – English summary”. https://coronakommissionen.com/publikationer/slutbetankande-sou-2022-10/.
[1] Eksemplerne er fra https://www.mercatornet.com/_laissez_faire_sweden_had_the_lowest_mortality
[2] https://time.com/5899432/sweden-coronovirus-disaster/
[3] https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/12/22/sweden-coronavirus-covid-response/
[4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericmack/2020/07/07/sweden-stayed-open-and-more-people-died-of-covid-19-but-the-real-reason-may-be-something-darker/
[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/business/sweden-economy-coronavirus.html
[6] https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/04/sweden-coronavirus-response-death-social-distancing.html
[7] https://twitter.com/miltimore79/status/1765129495797973460
[8] Anderberg (2022)
[9] “The Commission considers that the focus on recommendations which people are expected to follow voluntarily has been fundamentally correct”, Coronakommissionen Sverige (2022).