I am alarmed by some of the claims of the "coronavirus deniers" who demand an immediate end to the lockdown. They point to Sweden as an example of where we would be if we had not shut down our economy. Sweden, they argue, has simply encouraged social distancing, which is working. But that is not altogether true: Sweden tightened up its initial social distancing orders in early April; by late April, bars and restaurants that failed to obey social distancing were shut down. The country's major automobile manufacturers, Volvo and Saab, also closed their plants. Truck producer Scania had some 19,000 workers stay at home. IKEA was transformed into a sanitizer- and mask-making factory.
There is more to consider. Sweden had its first case on February 15, 2020, nearly two whole weeks after the Americans had theirs. It involved a single individual. By contrast, by that time, the closely-interlinked powers in continental Europe - Germany, Italy and France - had already reported several dozen cases collectively, and much of the world was already changing travel plans and shutting down. That meant Sweden had more time to evaluate and was the last one standing in a largely empty sandbox - no wonder it could keep on playing on, alone. Nobody was coming into the sandbox, so the rapid influx never came, and the government had time to weigh its options.
But wait: the minimal influx of potential carriers comes on top of what was already par for course in Sweden. The reason is Sweden's geography. Because of its geography, Sweden is well-insulated from the rest of continental Europe and even has the conceivably "remote" Baltic countries as a buffer. It is not a hub of air travel and transit. Moreover, Sweden has an infinitely-smaller population than most countries in Europe. It is smaller than many American cities; in fact, the largest city in Sweden is the capital city of Stockholm, with a population about equal to that of Jacksonville, Florida. To put it another way, Sweden's largest city is roughly the same size as the fourth-largest city in Texas: Austin. Sweden also has one of the world's lowest population densities. What that means is Sweden is in the best of positions to implement social distancing and have it actually work; it also means Swedes are among those who are most likely to have the least amount of contact with one another.
There's even more to that: Nordic countries like Sweden are known the world over for embracing personal space, unlike the "touching cultures" of the southern hemisphere (1, 2). In other words: the Swedes are groomed for social distancing because they were doing it before it was even a thing.
Similarly, Sweden also has a largely homogeneous community-culture, which means these tendencies are widespread. Sure, Sweden has changed in recent years due to the migrant crisis, but immigrant communities are, at large, de facto segregated communities.
Not surprisingly, it is the Africa-descended immigrants there who account for a disproportional number of country's COVID-19 deaths so far. Sweden has been blamed for this and "unequal access to expertise", whatever that means (1, 2). But note that it is also the southern European - and Africanized - countries that have fared the poorest amidst this coronavirus.
Assuming demographics and culture play a role, modern-day America is much closer to these places in terms of population and behavior than Sweden. Throw in the go-it-alone mentality that is somewhat exclusive to the U.S. and you can gather how Sweden's experiment is not really useful to understand what things would look like elsewhere without a shutdown. In conclusion, Sweden teaches us nothing.
