Via The Guardian: As Covid death toll soars ever higher, Sweden wonders who to blame. Excerpt:
“Thanks for reminding me,” Sweden’s state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell replied deadpan when the Observer asked in late March how he handled the knowledge that he would be to blame if Sweden’s decision to forego a lockdown were to go badly wrong.
“But seriously,” he continued, “I might look like a figurehead but agencies in Sweden are very much working as a whole. This isn’t something I decide alone in my office every morning.”
The message was clear. He didn’t think he would be held responsible if the light-touch Covid-19 regime associated with his name failed.
On Friday, as Sweden recorded 9,654 new cases and 100 deaths, the country’s prime minister, Stefan Löfven, suggested he might be right.
“This number of casualties – of course we wanted to avoid that. It’s nothing that you want to see,” he said, announcing the end to Sweden’s long hold-out against recommending face masks. “But … the responsibility here is not so easy, to point at exactly one person [and say] ‘you are responsible’.”
When Tegnell briefed Boris Johnson at the end of September, it still seemed possible that the high spread of infection in Sweden in the spring might grant enough immunity to make a second wave easier to control.
Now those hopes have been dashed, with the level of new daily cases, hospitalisations and deaths once again far above that seen in the country’s Nordic neighbours, Dr Tegnell and his former boss Johan Giesecke are no longer granted near daily interviews from herd immunity advocates in the British and US media.
But the shift in opinion within Sweden is even more marked. This is partly due to the failure of Tegnell’s Public Health Agency to anticipate the severity of the second wave, partly due to damning reports from the country’s health watchdog and coronavirus commission, and partly due to a more critical media.
Even the country’s king, Carl XVI Gustaf, described the country’s handling of the pandemic as “a failure” in the royals’ Christmas review of the year.
“Opinion in Sweden has really changed: there’s a broad criticism of the strategy and [a sense] that we have really failed,” said Jenny Madestam, an associate professor in politics at Stockholm’s Södertorn University.
In March and April, the media tended to defend rather than criticise the authorities, with dissident researchers who raised the alarm at the start of April branded “corona scandal-mongers” and “a shame for Sweden”, in the debate pages.
Eva Burman, chief editor for the regional Eskilstuna-Kuriren newspaper, remembers how its shocking revelations in May about how elderly people in care homes were being denied hospital treatment were ignored.
“That story never got published in the other papers: I think that maybe it was such a big story that they couldn’t take it in. They thought it might not be true,” she said. “I don’t know why the Swedish media have been so slow in asking critical questions.”
But, according to Marina Ghersetti, an associate professor of journalism at Gothenburg University, this is typical of how the Swedish media operates in a crisis.
“This is a pattern we’ve seen before. In the beginning, when everything is uncertain and chaotic, the focus is … on transmitting the information that public authorities give to media, without really questioning that information very much,” she said.
“A possible explanation for this is that even those in the media share the big confidence we have in public authorities.”
