Mick Hartley

More on Sweden and its coronavirus death toll. For many, particularly it seems on the left, Sweden's lax coronavirus strategy has inspired a kind of anger: it must, at all costs, be shown to have made a terrible mistake. Well, the Swedes admitted that they messed up on the care homes – as did we. Anything else?

Here's a paper from the America Institute of Economic Research that argues that there are other factors to account for Sweden's higher death rate, beyond their decision to avoid a lockdown. The authors cite a few minor factors that may have played a part, such as the timing of Swedish skiers returning from their Alpine holidays at the height of the pandemic in Northern Italy. In fact they claim to have identified sixteen possible factors in their full paper. But the one they're keen to emphasise is the "dry tinder " hypothesis: the idea that Sweden did worse than the other Scandinavian countries this time because they'd done better before:

But the single largest factor for why Sweden had it much worse than its Nordic neighbors during corona is the “dry tinder” hypothesis. We are sensitive about borrowing the “dry tinder” metaphor for the persons of human souls, but the metaphor is clarifying: Maybe a country has more forest fires this year than its neighbors because it had fewer fires in previous years, and dry tinder accumulated, awaiting a spark.

For the previous year’s flu season, Sweden saw remarkably low death rates, relative to its own recent history and to that of its neighbors. […]

Going into the corona pandemic of 2020, Sweden already had an abundance of vulnerable elderly who would not have survived a harsher flu season – and whose Danish, Norwegian and Finnish counterparts did not survive the previous years’ flu seasons in those countries. 

In our paper, we present and link to numerous other analyses of the “dry tinder” effect in Sweden. It is real, and it is very large. We provide some simple calculations to suggest that it might account for half of Sweden’s outsized COVID death toll. […]

Delivering the verdict on Sweden’s response to the corona pandemic must take this into account: going into 2020, Sweden was already in a more vulnerable position than its neighbors. 

Even if one disregards new research suggesting that lockdowns don’t work…, it is improbable that Sweden’s light lockdown is one of the main possible reasons for Sweden’s high COVID death rate. But we go on to list 15 other factors. The single-minded story that Sweden’s high death rate, relative to the other Nordics, stems from its relatively liberal corona policy lacks nuance. There are many other differences between Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland, including differences specific to the present. Compared to its neighbors, Sweden would have had a much worse death toll regardless of the policy measures it took in March 2020.