COVID Contrarians Are Wrong About Sweden

Trying to ‘let it rip’ in early 2020 was a disaster.

by Ryan Cooper August 1, 2025

Over the past several months, a conventional wisdom has been solidifying in certain centrist and liberal quarters that the controls imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic Went Too Far. This idea has crystallized in a book by two Princeton political scientists, Frances Lee and Stephen Macedo—notably not epidemiologists, or virologists, or public-health experts—called In COVID’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us. The authors have gotten a respectable hearing from PBS, Jake Tapper, and, of course, The Daily podcast from The New York Times.

The podcast If Books Could Kill recently did a deep-dive debunking of this book, but I want to focus on its treatment of Sweden because of how it’s become a synecdoche for the whole argument. In the Financial Times, the normally level-headed Ed Luce recently cited the Swedish example: “Everyone could agree back then that otherwise liberal Sweden was foolish to take the herd immunity route. That Sweden ended up with one of the lowest mortality rates in Europe has not been similarly highlighted.” The book “should be compulsory reading across the spectrum. That it has not been reviewed by most major newspapers is troubling,” he added.

OK, let’s discuss Sweden.

As an initial matter, Sweden, like the other Nordics, was much less vulnerable than most countries to a respiratory pandemic that hit the elderly the hardest, because of its household structure. According to the OECD, 40 percent of Swedish over-65s live by themselves—one of the highest rates in the world—while only about 5 percent live in households with non-seniors. That made it relatively more difficult for outbreaks at schools or workplaces to spread to the most vulnerable population.

SNIP* On the mortality question, while it is true (and I’ll admit, surprising) that Sweden’s overall rate of excess mortality was among the lowest in Europe, Lee and Macedo play fast and loose with statistics. The money quote: “This book is not a mystery novel, so, at the risk of ‘spoiling’ the surprise, at the end of June 2021 … Sweden’s excess morbidity for the period from January 2020 to the end of June 2021 was negative 2.3 percent,” they write. The citation on this goes to another anti-lockdown book by Johan Anderberg, who in turn cites the U.K. Office for National Statistics, which does indeed have that figure.
https://prospect.org/health/2025-08-01-covid-contrarians-are-wrong-about-sweden/

Imo, contraian is too polite a word for them.