Most governments around the world have copied the Chinese Communist Party regime’s response to COVID-19, which has consisted of sacrificing fundamental freedoms such as freedom of movement. This was supposed to be done ostensibly to “flatten the curve” of infections and prevent the collapse of health systems. It’s amazing how quickly almost every country in the West has rejected the traditional pandemic response manual and embraced the dictatorship manual. But there was an exception: Sweden.

Johan Norberg published a study comparing the results of the Swedish model in dealing with the pandemic with that of virtually the rest of the world based on various indicators of well-being.

A call to prepare for future pandemics

Although there have been some restrictions such as limiting social gatherings to more than 50 people in public places, distance education for high school and college students, among others, Swedish citizens have experienced minimal reductions in their freedoms during the pandemic.

Then a false dilemma was posed: freedom or saving lives. But was it really like that? We must be grateful to the Swedes because their example now allows us to make comparisons.

The WHO warns that covid “has not disappeared”, and it is known that Europe counts around 1,000 deaths per week

The influential Swedish model, based on a well-known study by Imperial College in England, predicted that Sweden would have 82,000 deaths from COVID-19 by July 1. But by July 2020, Sweden had suffered 5,455 deaths, just 7% of those predicted by the models. This number of deaths was lower than in Italy and Spain, but five or even ten times the number of their Nordic neighbors. But if we look at the end of the pandemic, we see that Sweden suffered 2,322 deaths from COVID-19 per million inhabitants, which is 40% more than the other Nordic countries, but a much smaller gap than in the summer of 2020. This is a mortality rate below that of countries in the South Europe and much lower than that in the USA.

We must be grateful to the Swedes because their example now allows us to make comparisons.

Of course, comparing deaths from COVID-19 has its own complications because all countries counted them differently. One thing that reduces this problem is the comparison of so-called “excessive deaths”, and Norberg points out that the data is even more surprising: the rate of excessive deaths in Sweden (4.4%) is less than half of the European average (11.1%) and is the lowest rate of all European countries during the three years of the pandemic (2020-22).

Norberg also takes into account other indicators of well-being. While the activity of the world economy and the eurozone was lower in 2021 than predicted before the pandemic (-2.9 and -2.1% respectively), that of the Swedish economy was higher (0.4%). In terms of education, an international study estimates that on average, children miss more than a third of their learning in a normal school year, and that this particularly affects those from low-income families. Meanwhile, Swedish children have not fallen behind in their studies.

A key difference between the Swedish strategy and most other governments was that it relied more on voluntary adjustment by individuals than on state coercion. (OR)