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COVID Contrarians Are Wrong About Sweden
Over the past several months, a conventional wisdom has been solidifying in certain centrist and liberal quarters that the controls imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic Went Too Far. This idea has crystallized in a book by two Princeton political scientists, Frances Lee and Stephen Macedo—notably not epidemiologists, or virologists, or public-health experts—called In COVID’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us. The authors have gotten a respectable hearing from PBS, Jake Tapper, and, of course, The Daily podcast from The New York Times.
The podcast If Books Could Kill recently did a deep-dive debunking of this book, but I want to focus on its treatment of Sweden because of how it’s become a synecdoche for the whole argument. In the Financial Times, the normally level-headed Ed Luce recently cited the Swedish example: “Everyone could agree back then that otherwise liberal Sweden was foolish to take the herd immunity route. That Sweden ended up with one of the lowest mortality rates in Europe has not been similarly highlighted.” The book “should be compulsory reading across the spectrum. That it has not been reviewed by most major newspapers is troubling,” he added.
OK, let’s discuss Sweden.
As an initial matter, Sweden, like the other Nordics, was much less vulnerable than most countries to a respiratory pandemic that hit the elderly the hardest, because of its household structure. According to the OECD, 40 percent of Swedish over-65s live by themselves—one of the highest rates in the world—while only about 5 percent live in households with non-seniors. That made it relatively more difficult for outbreaks at schools or workplaces to spread to the most vulnerable population.
The Swedish experience cannot be generalized to countries like Greece, where about 40 percent of seniors live with non-seniors, and just over 20 percent live alone—let alone poor countries where multigenerational cohabitation is the norm. Also unlike most of the world, Sweden has a world-class public health care system, high state capacity, and a relatively high-trust population willing to follow government instructions.
The podcast If Books Could Kill recently did a deep-dive debunking of this book, but I want to focus on its treatment of Sweden because of how it’s become a synecdoche for the whole argument. In the Financial Times, the normally level-headed Ed Luce recently cited the Swedish example: “Everyone could agree back then that otherwise liberal Sweden was foolish to take the herd immunity route. That Sweden ended up with one of the lowest mortality rates in Europe has not been similarly highlighted.” The book “should be compulsory reading across the spectrum. That it has not been reviewed by most major newspapers is troubling,” he added.
OK, let’s discuss Sweden.
As an initial matter, Sweden, like the other Nordics, was much less vulnerable than most countries to a respiratory pandemic that hit the elderly the hardest, because of its household structure. According to the OECD, 40 percent of Swedish over-65s live by themselves—one of the highest rates in the world—while only about 5 percent live in households with non-seniors. That made it relatively more difficult for outbreaks at schools or workplaces to spread to the most vulnerable population.
The Swedish experience cannot be generalized to countries like Greece, where about 40 percent of seniors live with non-seniors, and just over 20 percent live alone—let alone poor countries where multigenerational cohabitation is the norm. Also unlike most of the world, Sweden has a world-class public health care system, high state capacity, and a relatively high-trust population willing to follow government instructions.
https://prospect.org/health/2025-08-01-covid-contrarians-are-wrong-about-sweden/