Welp, it took me 2 years but I finally succumbed to Covid-19. In the end it wasn't packed bus travel, flights, holidays, supermarkets, parties, clubs, bars, restaurants or any other of the fun or travelling-to-fun things that finally got me, it was a 6-year old child I teach. Of course, there's never any way to be 100% certain where viruses come from, but this 6-year old was very sick, carrying a snotty tissue around the school, and coughed wetly directly into my face around 4/5 days before the onset of symptoms...
To mark the occasion, and because I'm sitting here in my house for the 4th day in a row with nothing much doin', here are some very Swedish responses to the pandemic I've observed over the last couple of years.
1. No Masks
I've been to the UK a few times during the pandemic and masks are a must-have. Everyone has at least one with them in a pocket or in a bag to put on when they enter a shop or public transport. This is a behaviour that simply never manifested in Sweden. There are some people who wear them, if I take my observation of busy central Stockholm shopping hubs as an example, I'd estimate that these are about 15% of people. On public transport, even when it gets really busy, I'd say its a similar figure. Last year before the vaccines came there was a definite increase in masks on the tube, maybe 75% of people wore them, but then the behaviour never stuck around after the summer.
When I went to visit the GP a few weeks ago I was wearing a mask, and seeing me wearing one prompted my GP to put one on.
Additionally, if you ask someone why they're wearing a mask, more often than not they'll say its for protection - and there is a prevailing idea that masks protect the wearer and not everyone else around the wearer. Sweden often projects an image of itself as a society in which everyone plays their part in making the country somewhere pleasant for everyone else, but more than ever before has this fallacy been completely blown out of the water by the mask question. People wear them here for themselves, and not for everyone else - i.e. in the most pointless manner possible.
2. Rapid Antigen Tests
Fast, cheap and reliable testing backed up with effective contact tracing is the backbone of the world's most successful Covid responses. Fast, cheap and reliable testing also never manifested in Sweden. For the last few months, "gargle tests" have become available in a few schools in response to outbreaks there, notice in response to and not preemptively. Workplaces here do not distribute or encourage regular self testing. Before meeting with groups of friends and family if you want to do a test you will have to pay through the nose for a stash of private antigen tests. This phenomenon has only now started to take off in the wake of omicron - friends and family in England have been taking "Lateral Flow" tests for the better part of the last year. I detected this manifestation of covid in myself with a lateral flow a good 36 hours before noticeable symptoms and kept myself at home a day earlier than I would have, saving me from meeting a lot of students and interacting with a lot of people.
3. State Mandated PCR Tests
Ok, so there's a distinct lack of fast N cheap testing, but I'm always blown away by the efficiency of PCR testing. There are multiple ways to get tested, always free, never more than a day or two away even in the busiest depths of central Stockholm. The method I've used most is to have a taxi courier drive the test to and from my house to a laboratory at state cost, even when I've come back from international travel. This method has kept several taxi companies running despite people not being able to go anywhere during some points in the pandemic. The results are collated and used for the national tracing strategy and to inform policy.
4. Vaccines
Vaccine uptake in Sweden is among the highest in the world. You know what else is higher in Sweden compared to many other places? Trust in government. I'm not a sociologist or a statistician but I'd bet money there's more than just a coincidental relationship between those two variables. Vaccine uptake here is lowest among people without a Swedish background - you know who has most reason to distrust state machinery? Low paid immigrants.
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| Taken from the Swedish Health Agency |
5. Lockdowns
Or, as the case actually is, no lockdowns. Sweden never had any lockdowns. Some measures were brought in to minimise spread, at their height pre-vaccine these included limits on gatherings, no more than 4 seated at public tables, restricted numbers in indoor areas, no events, enforced closing time of 8pm in bars, distance teaching in high schools, working from home as much as possible and closed swimming pools. Schools stayed open as much as possible so that workers could keep working - unless, like me, they were teachers and had to just keep GOING even when 50% of you were NOT THE FUCK THERE. After the first few months of covid, which predominantly affected the elderly in Sweden, a colleague of mine died and someone up above realised it probably was not a good idea to keep us carrying on as normal, so I did some distance teaching for a while.
Even though there were no lockdowns like in other countries, there were times when central Stockholm was like a ghost town. People were afraid to go out, families met on zoom instead, I saw some old ladies last winter desperate to sit down after a walk together in the snow but too scared to sit indoors for a bit. I kept going to the local pub which had good social distancing measures and because the pub needed it - they lost so much business and recieved very little to compensate the loss. A lot of places have gone bust, although the majority of high street businesses here are chains that can survive.
6. The Law
It is not possible under Swedish constitutional law to restrict the freedom of movement of citizens, and therefore you can't force them all to be locked down. A temporary "Pandemic Law" came into force early last year to allow restrictions on gatherings, international travel and the other measures given above, but it stops short of being able to enforce a total lockdown. It will be interesting, indeed it is already interesting if not worrying, to see how different countries dismantle (or do not dismantle) controls brought in for the handling of the pandemic. It is an academic question for the ages to assess who did what and why and what the consequences were, but in Sweden at least, this was the way the law was applied and the lack of lockdowns and higher spread of covid compared with her neighbors were some of the outcomes.
7. New Swedish Words
Covid has affected every language and changed the way we use several words - some concepts we use considerably more than ever before (vaccine, lateral flow, antigen, viral load, incubation time, contagious, covid, corona, antivirals, epidemiologist, just to name a few). In Sweden this means learning and comfortably meeting and using specialist words in everyday parlance that I otherwise would only have learned in extremely specific conditions (smittspridning, folkhälsomyndigheten, bekräftade fall, luftvägarna, munskydd, Anders Tegnell). Speaking of which, this might not be a specifically Swedish phenomenon, but a cult of personality erupted around the state epidemiologist, with people even going so far as to tattoo him on their bodies...
8. What next?
Well - what next indeed. In Sweden I think people are resolutely trying to live a normal life again (which you can't do in the winter when everyone is smushed indoors with no air and the cases skyrocket). Shopping centres are crowded again, workplaces had a stint at trying to lure workers back from their mjukisbyxor (loungewear) and schools are carrying on even with half the staff and kids missing. But settling in to a routine in which summer is great and winter is despair is an inorexable and fundamental prerequisite for Swedish life!
