Anders Tegnell: Sweden won the argument on Covid

Sweden has consequently, during the entire pandemic, delayed every kind of measure that was taken elsewhere, and then sometimes introduced the same thing weeks or months later. It also - during the entire pandemic - resisted mask mandates, while going from stigmatizing masks to half-heartedly "recommending" them without any enforcement whatsoever, even though it became quite clear quickly that widespread mask use did have good likelihood of helping to reduce the spread on a society level (while, unlike strict lockdowns, being only a minor inconvenience), particularly in settings where many vulnerable can be found. There are so many reports of that even months into the pandemic, staff working at nursing homes where prohibited from wearing masks by their superiors, who referred to the health agency's anti-mask stance.

So if you look at Sweden's death toll of around 15K in addition to probably hundreds of thousands who had to suffer through more severe Covid cases, plus longcovid cases, plus tens of thousands who had their surgeries delayed due to overfull hospitals, there is no way one can argue that Sweden could not have done much, much better and saved many more lives / saved more people from traumatic hospital experiences. Not even by opting for strict lockdowns like many other countries (that's its own very complicated issue, which I am not taking a stance on in this comment), but simply by just being a bit less stubborn and sure of itself, by being more open to learnings from elsewhere, by making use of precautionary principles, and by being more honest to the population about what international scientific consensuses were emerging about the ways how Covid spread, about herd immunity etc. Swedes were systematically misinformed by the authorities during the pandemic, and many still haven't understood the dynamic of superspreading. They still think that washing your hands and keeping 2 meters distance is the way to avoid infection. "Wash your hands often" is still part of the official guideline to prevent Covid from spreading (nothing against washing hands, but it's so absurd that this is still considered and communicated as an important cornerstone of fighting the pandemic today).

So attempts to compare Sweden with other countries to show that Sweden did or did not good after all, or to blame the bad outcome on chance, are misguided and likely motivated by wanting one's own idea about Sweden's path to be confirmed. In reality, Sweden (what it did) needs to be compared with Sweden (what it could have done). And in that regard, it's quite a failure.

If you take the pareto principle of trying to achieve 80 percent of the outcome with 20 percent of the effort, Sweden did rather only 10 percent of the effort, to achieve maybe 50 percent of the outcome (while Tegnell and others surely want to believe it's more of the 20/80 kind).