Is Sweden's coronavirus strategy a cautionary tale or a success story?

Streets in Stockholm’s Old Town were nearly empty
in April because of the coronavirus pandemic

Sweden was one of the few European countries 
not to impose a 

compulsory lockdown. Its unusual strategy for 
tackling the

 coronavirus outbreak has been both hailed as a
 success and

 condemned as a failure. So which is it?

Those who regard the strategy as a success claim
 it reduced the

 economic impact, but it isn’t clear that it did. 
What is clear is that

 so far Sweden has had a more protracted
 outbreak with far more 

deaths per capita than its neighbours.

While it is sometimes implied that Sweden didn’t
 have a lockdown, 

it did. It was just largely voluntary, with only a 
few legal measures 

such as a ban on gatherings of more than 50 
people.

“Voluntary restrictions work as well as legal
 ones,” says the architect

 of Sweden’s strategy, chief epidemiologist Anders Tegnell.

This appears to be true, in Sweden at least. 
The measures did work

 nearly as well in getting people to change their
 behaviour. Adam 

Sheridan at the University of Copenhagen in 
Denmark, for instance, 

has used data from a bank to compare spending
 patterns up to April 

in Sweden and Denmark. Denmark introduced 
a compulsory lockdown on 11 March, one of the 
first in Europe.

Sheridan found that spending – an indicator of
 behaviour as well as

 economic activity – fell by nearly as much in
 Sweden as in Denmark:

 25 per cent compared with 29 per cent.

Similarly, data from the Citymapper phone app, 
which helps people 

plan their travel routes, suggests that travel in 
Stockholm fell to 40 

per cent of the normal level. “That’s a substantial
 reduction,” says 

Martin McKee at the London School of Hygiene
 & Tropical Medicine,

 whose team did the analysis. However, there 
were even bigger falls

 in other major European cities during 
compulsory lockdowns, to 

20 per cent on average.

So there was a substantial voluntary lockdown 
in Sweden – yet it

 wasn’t nearly as effective in reducing the spread
 of the coronavirus

 as the compulsory lockdowns in neighbouring 
Denmark and Norway.

 Cases and deaths rose faster in Sweden and have
 been slower to 

decline.

Sweden has about 8200 confirmed cases per 
million people as of 12 

August, compared with 1780 in Norway and 
2560 in Denmark. (For 

the UK it is 4600 and the US 15,400.)

Sweden has had 57 deaths per 100,000, 
compared with five in Norway

 and 11 in Denmark. (For the UK it is 70 and the
 US 50.)

Sheridan’s analysis suggests that young people 
– whose spending 

makes little contribution to the overall economy 
– were least likely 

to change their behaviour and might have 
undermined the voluntary

 lockdown. Among people aged between 18 and 
29, spending dropped 

far less in Sweden than in Denmark.