Sweden’s policymaker defends Covid response at Dublin conference

Sweden’s approach to Covid-19 was broadly similar to that of other countries and produced similar results, according to the architect of the Nordic country’s often controversial pandemic policy.

"We had a virtual lockdown, but with more voluntary measures," Dr Anders Tegnell told a conference in Dublin.

Sweden’s efforts to contain the virus and mitigate spread was “in line” with that of other European countries, he said, and resulted in excess mortality that is “almost as low” as Ireland’s.

Sweden was the only western European country not to introduce a widespread lockdown during the first coronavirus wave in 2020, though it imposed more restrictions in later waves.

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Dr Tegnell said his country’s policies during the pandemic were often misrepresented, but herd immunity was never their goal.

From the start of the pandemic, "we understood it was going to be a marathon not a sprint and that we weren't going to be able to stop this by closing the borders," Sweden's former chief epidemiologist told a conference on Covid-19 outcomes at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI).

Asked why Sweden had performed worse than other Nordic countries, Dr Tegnell described Norway and Finland as "outliers" and said Sweden was "in the middle of the field" in Europe for excess mortality.

He suggested greater economic disparities, a higher immigrant population and greater housing density may have led to Sweden having a higher excess mortality than its neighbours.

Ireland would probably have done "quite well" in the pandemic without introducing legislative controls, according to Prof Ruairi Brugha of the RCSI.

‘Remarkably compliant’

Far from being rebellious, he said, Irish people were “remarkably compliant” during the pandemic, with high public support for infection control measures.

Prof Brugha said Irish people were “beating themselves up” last year over their approach to containing the virus, when now, looking back, it seems their approach was the correct one.

However, a similar level of community support cannot be assumed in a future epidemic and for this reason a citizens assembly is needed to start engagement around the possibility of “much worse scenarios,” he warned.

Reviewing Ireland's performance during the pandemic, Prof Brugha said we did not do as well as other countries that applied decisive quarantines, such as New Zealand and Australia. "But I don't think we could have introduced border controls because of the realpolitik of where we were, with a land border with another country that was not responding to Covid in a responsible way."

He praised the Irish response for making decisions speedily at the start of the pandemic, but then criticised the discharge of elderly patients from hospitals into “poorly-staffed” nursing homes with no personal protective equipment. In addition, the third wave that occurred over Christmas 2020 represented “a failure of politics that resulted in hundreds of needless deaths,” he said.