Cost-benefit calculation for the world

But let's remember that is the very justification Swedish state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell gave for refusing lockdowns in the first place — and for which he and Sweden were widely derided as a wrong-headed and cynical policy. Tegnell was forced to repeat ad nauseam in the Swedish and international press that this was not, in fact, a concerted attempt at defeating the virus by achieving “herd immunity” with a majority of the population immunized via infection. Instead, this was the very same kind of cost-benefit calculation based on the specific context of Sweden, whose healthcare system was never overburdened and population in favor of light restrictions.

So what do we make of the fact that Sweden’s strategy (held up globally as a case of reckless defiance or some misguided sense of northern exceptionalism) is now becoming the strategy of the world?

To be clear, this isn’t saying that Sweden didn’t make mistakes: After all, the country’s Public Health Agency has admitted that a central part of the strategy, i.e. protecting the old, failed as nursing homes were under-equipped and ill-prepared to follow health protocols. In addition, the constantly evolving health and social distancing “guidelines” issued by authorities eventually became too numerous and confusing to be effective.

Losing war, claiming victory

Rather, the point is that there’s something worrying about our leaders rebranding what was only months ago agreed upon as a dangerous “herd-immunity” approach as a joyful spring awakening.

Of course, we know from history that politicians have a special talent for proclaiming lost wars a victory. Perhaps, as it’s by now hard to see how anyone would score these last two years a win, the narrative around COVID and restrictions had to change. The real winner is what we’ve come to call “COVID fatigue,” where the economic and health calculations are swept aside by the simple fact that the virus has exhausted society.

The deepening cultural and political divide over everything from lockdowns to vaccines stand as a sad testament to that we now live in a global society where seemingly nothing — not even a common enemy as lethal as this pandemic — can bring the herd together.