Over the past few weeks, a huge amount of energy has been spent trying to prove Sweden’s more lenient approach to the coronavirus a failure.
Liberal news outlets in the US have commissioned opinion pieces from Right-wing Swedish commentators accusing the country of a pivot to national chauvinism; President Trump has talked about the Swedish “herd” approach and how “they are suffering very, very badly“; and Twitter is full of apocalyptic charts that are shared thousands of times and which seem to prove beyond doubt that the Swedes should have locked down better, and sooner:
But hold on a sec. That chart is carefully designed to look bad for Sweden — the timeline is extended in a way that makes the curve appear more dramatic, and the countries it features are only those which have lower deaths per million. Here’s the same exact chart, from the same source, compared with a different set of fully ‘locked down’ European countries:
Suddenly the Swedish curve looks the best — and flattening out rapidly.
The truth is, the Swedish epidemic is far from the out of control disaster its critics would like to believe. Yesterday, there were 12 deaths from Covid-19; the previous day there were 17; the day before that there were 77 and the day before that there were 106. We could expect levels to catch up after this Easter weekend, but it can hardly be described as exponential growth.
A clearer way of looking at death numbers, also courtesy of the excellent Our World in Data, is the daily trend of deaths per million. Here you get a good sense of the trajectories. All of the countries listed below, except Sweden, have full national lockdowns. And yet Sweden is roughly in the middle of the pack. This is quite remarkable in itself, when set against the dominant narrative that lockdowns are the only thing capable of ‘flattening’ these curves and preventing tragedies that are many times worse.
More immediately useful than the death figures (which are three weeks or more out of date by the time they are published) is the chart which monitors daily new admissions into Swedish critical care with Covid-19. How many seriously ill people are presenting every day? Again, the chart depicts a far from exponential increase. It looks to have been roughly flat for the past couple of weeks:
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