CASE STUDY: Suécia - "É uma questão de liberdade, não de epidemiologia"

«Em Portugal, a liberdade é muito difícil, sobretudo porque não temos liberais. Temos libertinos, demagogos ou ultramontanos de todas as cores, mas pessoas que compreendam a dimensão profunda da liberdade já reparei que há muito poucas». É um retrato deste país por Alçada Baptista que está há mais de uma dúzia de anos a servir de epígrafe deste blogue.

Sabemos que os portugueses como povo apreciam pouco a liberdade e estão dispostos facilmente a dela abdicar em benefício de um Estado Sucial extorsionário que lhes dê colo e os oprima. Mas, que diabo!, não é obrigatório que todos nos babemos com a "eficácia" do Estado totalitário chinês a combater a pandemia que ele próprio tentou esconder e deixou propagar. Olhemos, por exemplo, para a resposta sueca à pandemia como nos é descrita por Fredrik Erixon no artigo «No lockdown, please, we’re Swedish» na Spectator.

«Who would have thought that Sweden would end up being the last place in Europe where you could go for a beer? We have, in our normalcy, suddenly become an exotic place. Other countries are closing their cities, schools and economies, but life in our corner of the world is surprisingly ordinary. Last weekend I went to the gym, met up with friends, and sat in the spring sun at outdoor cafés.

My foreign friends are stunned. They can’t fathom that there are still people enjoying the fruits of civilisation, as if the natural reaction to pandemics is to embrace totalitarianism. And they wrestle with another conundrum: how on earth did Sweden end up being the final bastion of liberty? How did this country of mild-mannered conformists end up rebelling against lockdown culture?

In the past, most Swedes felt comfortable with the nanny state giving us orders — telling us how many slices of bread to eat per day, for instance. We still close off-licences at 3 p.m. on a Saturday. The general idea is that if people were given the freedom and responsibility to figure out these things on their own, anarchy might follow.

We worry about Covid-19 a lot. Many people work from home. Restaurants are open, but not bustling. Keeping two metres apart at bus stops is something Swedes were pretty good at before the crisis: we don’t need much encouragement now. We’re careful. But our approach to fighting the pandemic starts from something more fundamental: in a liberal democracy you have to convince and not command people into action. If you lose that principle, you will lose your soul.

Stefan Löfven, Sweden’s centre-left premier, has dismissed calls for a lockdown, saying ‘we can’t legislate and ban everything’. He’s no evangelist for libertarian principles, and may yet bring in harder measures. But so far he’s been saying that ‘we all, as individuals, have to take responsibility’ and not just wait for the government to lock us up.

At the centre of our debate is Anders Tegnell, the ‘state epidemiologist’, and Johan Giesecke — an epidemiology don (and one of Tegnell’s predecessors) who has captured the country’s attention with his no-messing attitude. Both advise caution — and common sense. As in Britain, many scientists have appealed to the government to close schools and impose curfews. Unlike in Britain, the authorities have calmly responded by explaining how this wouldn’t really help. They publish their own models of the virus spread. It shows how many people will need hospital care: the system, they say, can cope. And when asked, they say they don’t think Imperial College has made a better call.

Perhaps Tegnell and his team will turn out to be wrong. But their point is that the people deserve policies that work for longer than a month. Managing the virus is a long game, and while herd immunity is not the Swedish strategy, it may well be where we all end up. The theory of lockdown, after all, is pretty niche, deeply illiberal — and, until now, untested. It’s not Sweden that’s conducting a mass experiment. It’s everyone else.

The main advice from Tegnell et al is repeated like a mantra ten times a day: be sensible. Stay at home if you feel sick. Oh, and wash your hands. But individuals, companies, schools and others are trusted to figure out on their own what precautions to take.

This Swedish exceptionalism is about principle, not epidemiology. It’s true that we’re perhaps less at risk due to our high rate of single-person households and low number of smokers. Closing the schools would, as well, have a bigger impact in a country where almost all mums are working mums. But frankly, all these explanations miss the point: yes, they make us different to Italy and Spain, but not to Denmark, Finland and Norway. Sweden simply made the call to take measures that don’t destroy the free society.»