In the beginning of the pandemic I wrote a blogpost in Swedish, inspired by Tyler Cowen, arguing that we owe it to ourselves to predict a number of fatalities that we believe would within what we expect to reach – because without this we just recede into a position of referenceless criticism. The key I developed then to assessing the Swedish pandemic response had two dimensions – an absolut one where I set success at under 20000 deaths in a year, and a relative one where I set success to not more than 15% more deaths than our country neighbors. On the first dimension, then, the Swedish strategy was a success, and on the other an abysmal failure. In this follow up note I try to explore why that can be, and how to think about it as I keep struggling with how to evaluate the public response to the pandemic – on the 31st of December 2021.
I increasingly think that we need to look at a multifactor analysis that contains both preparedness measures, disease control measures and disease treatment measures to evaluate where we end up here. And it is far to easy to just speak about a pandemic strategy, as if that was a cohesive whole. The whole note here in Swedish.