Sweden vs. RoW
And the winner is…?
The topic is delicate. Nonetheless, I will try and summarize why I think the Swedes are the winners for the way they manage(d) the pandemics.
- We still know little about this virus. There are reasons to be optimistic re the possibility to develop a vaccine and on the virus becoming milder, but uncertainty is still high. What if it comes back this autumn and next year again? We shut ourselves at home again? We live in a constant state of Healthcare Police with someone picking you up for testing or imposing a strict quarantine because you result having been a positive’s contact? We maintain travel bans for years, meaning end of globalisation? Unfortunately, we can improve treatments and we can, again, try and make a vaccine available for all as quickly as possible. But we have also to be prepared to live with it, without destroying all we have built so far. The severity of the disease does not seam to justify the damage of a “new normal” of excessive distancing and segregation
- An amazing judgment of the Italian Supreme Court few years back stated that “no right is tyrant”. This is the quintessence of a liberal democracy. Of course, you can compress some rights for a limited period of time to protect others (and also in Sweden mass gatherings were forbidden) but you cannot jail people for months. You can’t compress the rights of kids to go to school and socialize. You can’t forbid people to assist their relatives in hospitals. You can’t take corps and cremate them with children not even allowed an extreme greeting. You can’t conceal the right of ownership to the point that locked down people cannot decide to pick the house where they want to stay. You can’t de facto impose bankruptcy on companies by impeding them to work, even with the safest measures in place. Last but not least, you can’t augment social divide: a lockdown is hard for well off people, but is unbearable for a family of five living in 60/80 sqm. Remote learning is a poor experience for all kids but what about those who don’t have a high speed network connection? All this has to do with human dignity
- We give people the right to vote but we think they need the State to be safe. Of course in the beginning people were unaware and unprepared (exactly like States), which led to severe outbreaks. Nonetheless, no elderly is willing to die. No child is eager to be infected, nor is willing to kill his parents. There is no free ride incentive because infected don’t attack others for the sake of infecting. Hence do we really need to threaten penalties or send drones to catch lonely runners on the beaches? If on the contrary we think others (never us) are all silly, ignorant suicides, well… let’s forget democracy
- Freedom is there. People who feel at risk can decide to “stay home and stay safe”. And yes here the Authorities need to do as much as they can to allow this type of freedom. Positive freedom
Of course, in certain specific situations restrictive measures can be a necessity. I think in Lombardy it was difficult to chose otherwise (though I blame the politicians for reaching that stage). But such measures need to be clearly explained, the perimeter has to be defined based on true scientific criteria, and have to last as little as possible. For the same reason, I don’t subscribe to a statement like “Sweden did wrong because it had a higher death toll than other Nordics”. Since Swedish hospitals and ICUs were not in distress, it would have been disproportionate to conceal the rights of 99.995% of the population to save part — not all — of the remaining 0.005%.
That’s why I say, even though the story is not over: the odds are Sweden-RoW 2–0
