A government-appointed commission in Sweden has found that the authorities made the right decision not to impose a lockdown during the Covid-19 crisis – and claimed that the recurring lockdowns imposed across Europe were neither “necessary” nor “defensible”.
The Commission said that Sweden had “come through the pandemic relatively well and is among the countries with the lowest excess mortality over the period 2020–2021”. Sweden relied mostly on voluntary measures in terms of Covid restrictions, and did not shutter businesses.
The inquiry said that the measures – including business supports – “taken in 2020 helped to slow the fall in the economy and to speed the recovery in 2021”.
The country’s Coronavirus Commission said that many countries that enforced “extended or recurring mandatory lockdowns” had “experienced significantly worse outcomes than Sweden, indicating at present, at least, that it is highly uncertain what effect lockdowns have in fact had.”
Sweden attracted international criticism during the pandemic by choosing to issue recommendations on home-working, social distancing and good hand hygiene, rather than wide-sweeping restrictions.
The inquiry said it found that the restriction of individual freedom in other jurisdictions was “hardly defensible other than in the face of very extreme threats” – and that Sweden’s decision to rely primarily on “advice and recommendations which people were expected to follow voluntarily” had been “fundamentally correct”.
However, an earlier report from the Commission also said that more should have been done to protect those in nursing homes and residential care centres. “[T]he factor that has had the greatest impact on the number of cases of illness and deaths from Covid-19 in Swedish residential care is structural shortcomings that have been well-known for a long time. These shortcomings have led to residential care being unprepared and ill-equipped to handle a pandemic. Staff employed in the elderly care sector were largely left by themselves to tackle the crisis,” it said.
It’s February 2022 report also agreed that Sweden’s government was right to not shut primary and lower secondary schools during the crisis, but argued that other “indoor settings where people gather or come into close contact” should have been temporarily restricted in the first wave.
Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s state epidemiologist, has always argued that it would take years to see whether his recommendations against lockdowns were the right ones. He believed that the negative effects of lockdowns – on medical outcomes for conditions such as cancer, on the economy and on mental health and education – would take years to reveal.