Tales of cognitive dissonance, or: my life in Sweden during the pandemic
I finally decided to write down my experience of living through the pandemic in Sweden. I have been unsure about whether this is actually a good idea — especially for my career. But I have a moral imperative to speak up, especially now that the revisionist machine is in motion. However, for some reasons, it feels extremely uncomfortable.
I never expected to end up living in Sweden. I moved here in the fall of 2017, after several months of a long-distance relationship with my now-husband, who is Swedish. We met while we were both trainees at our respective embassies in Hanoi, Vietnam. After months of job seeking, in October 2018, I started working at a Swedish University as a PhD student in Political Science.
I have very few complaints about my life in Sweden prior to the pandemic. On the contrary, after relocating I felt like I was in a safe place for the very first time. I grew up in northern Italy, and I have always lived in what was then considered to be a very, very bad neighbourhood. The kind of neighbourhood people from other cities heard about in the news, and where my friends (and their parents) preferred not to venture at night if I needed a ride. In Sweden, I finally felt safe from the incessant male gaze, even if it took me some months to even understand how much it had affected me over the years. Here, I could finally go out on my own, dressed as I wanted, no matter the hour of the day (or the night). Which is relative, of course, considering the long hours of daylight and of darkness, depending on the season.
In Sweden, I could finally let my guard down, unlearn how to activate all my senses if a man entered my wagon on the train. I did not need to carry a pepper spray in each pocket everywhere I went (by the way: pepper sprays are illegal in Sweden), I was not afraid to be harassed, catcalled, or followed. What I felt like, was as that finally I was not primarily a young woman who walks this world feeling so naked sometimes: most of the weight coming from the toxic looks of both men and women was somehow lift from my shoulders. No one paid attention to me, to how I looked or what I wore. Of course, this is my personal experience, and I do not mean to take anything away from someone else who might not have felt the same way.
Why am I telling you all this? I will get to it, I promise. Just keep all this information in the back of your mind. It will take a bit, but I am getting to the point.
At work, I found a wonderful, unexpectedly egalitarian environment characterized (apparently) by a very flat hierarchy. So flat that everybody is called by their first name, and there’s no need for titles. Doing a PhD in Sweden is (usually) the best of both worlds: on one hand, you are still a student, while on the other, you are a full-time public employee with all the benefits coming with working in one of the countries with the highest welfare in the world. After two years, I am already earning more than my parents. Of course, the life cost is higher here — but not that much, and it is still worth it. I am currently renting a two-room apartment downtown a medium-size city, my husband and I saved enough to pay for our own wedding, I have a small financial cushion and I was able to help my sister relocate to another Swedish town when she enrolled in a Master program in Applied Ethics. I am, like most people that are lucky enough to be almost fully integrated into Swedish society (personal number and all) quite comfortable.
When I first got the news of the novel coronavirus in January 2020, I was on holiday in Las Palmas (Spain), breaking the darkness of the winter. I was momentary without a phone — I just lost it — but I was still trying to gather information about it as I am really involved with China and I have many friends living there. By the time I got back to work, I was convinced that, while the new virus was not something to be underestimated, it probably would not be as dangerous as a bad flu. I remember even sharing this thought with my office roommate, Cecilia, who made a career in journalism before coming to academia. She told me that she had another opinion and that for the time being she would work from home as much as possible.
By February, it was clear that the new coronavirus was quickly spreading in Italy. My family is from the Veneto region, and my closest relatives and friends live in the city of Padova. I followed with apprehension not only the increase of new cases but also of fake news and sporadic episodes of racism towards the Asian community. I was worried for my sister who, like me, is half Asian — especially after a Filipino man was assaulted at a local LIDL store, accused to be “a Chinese responsible for the coronavirus”. My friends were telling me how people were ‘going crazy’ and buying large amounts of pasta and toilet paper, “just in case” (of a possible lockdown).
In Sweden, after an initial phase of uncertainty and pondering over the question, it seemed like people decided that there was no need to panic. I, for one, just signed up to Twitter and I was mostly complaining about my favourite pre-pandemic topics: people misspelling my name, human rights abuses in Egypt, single-use waste and climate change.
By March, I was in a panic. On one hand, I was reading the Italian news and receive daily updates from family and friends. My hometown, Padova, was one of the epicentres of the outbreak — or: it was particularly efficient in testing. I am no epidemiologist, but I understood that the main problem, was that this new coronavirus was very easily spread, even by people who were not presenting symptoms (yet, or ever). At the same time, I travelled from my hometown to Karlstad to attend a doctoral course in statistics, and I was shocked by the fact that both universities were packed with students, mainly high-schoolers from all over the country visiting the campuses. I wrote about it in a group for Italians in Sweden, asking if there were other people working in Swedish Academia that were as alarmed as I was. I started to make contact and organize a group of Italian academics and experts in various field in order to work on a document to be sent to the Swedish authorities.
In the meanwhile, it was when I saw my colleagues gathered in the common room having fika I started feeling a knot in my throat, and I decided to address the situation in my workplace. For those who are not familiar with Swedish culture, fika is the traditional break, involving a cup of coffee and a small pastry, or sandwich. In many workplaces is organized as a buffet, from which the English word smorgasbord derives (smörgås = sandwich; bord = table). Anyways, I gathered my courage and I wrote the following email to my department, which I report here in its integral form as it contains a good recap of the situation at the time:
Dear all,
I know it’s not up to me to provide public safety announcements, but I have been following the news regarding the coronavirus since its outbreak in China, Italy and now Sweden (who of you knows me can make the connection). I need to send this email to be at peace with my conscience. I strongly disagree with what was written in Inforum [AN: the university’s site private area for employees] about the precautions to be taken after the big event our University hosted where a positive person was present. In Inforum it has been written to stay home if we present symptoms, however it has been clear that in most people is asymptomatic. My understanding is that the Swedish authorities are doing the same mistake we’ve done in Italy, which means to initially try to pin point all the Lombardy cases to China. Sweden is doing the same with northern Italy and, to a lesser extent, to Iran. In fact, the “mysterious” cases in the newspapers refer to those we cannot pinpoint to travels abroad. In Italy we had the first case on February 22nd, by March 9th we had 10,000 confirmed cases in a country where they are testing with the tampons way more than the rest of Europe.
As you might now I am from Northern Italy and I am in contact with many country people that have been traveling back and forth. When they come back, they follow the guidelines and call 1177, and if they are asymptomatic they tell them to go to the Vårdcentralen [healthcare clinic], which is the worst thing to do as you might be asymptomatic but yet enter in contact with other people which are likely to be weak (otherwise they wouldn’t be at the doctor’s waiting room).
We have not have to panic but we have to learn from the lessons from the other countries. Also ebola is “just a flu”, it all depends on the response capacities of the place where you are. People die in flocks because of diarrhea and dehydration in certain parts of the world. In this case, Lombardy region has more ICU than the whole Sweden, yet they have so many cases they have to decide who to intubate and who to leave to die, according to ethical concerns like age, previous diseases etc. At the moment the bar is set at 60 years, which is extremely young in European standards.
For a more authoritative voice, I post here a comment by [an Italian epidemiologist working at Karolinska] that was circulating in the Italian community […], so we can send it around. I call for canceling the Fika and I hope as many of us as possible will try to work from home as much as possible.
The comment I referred to in the email was originally posted in the same Facebook group of Italians in Sweden where I initially asked for help in drafting the document to be sent to the local health authorities. I will translate from Swedish:
I work with epidemiology and global health at Karolinska [institutet]. I am personally, and obviously not the only one, to agree that Sweden lacked preventive initiatives that aimed to limit the infection BECAUSE the outbreak is the same one as it is in Italy. Especially on Saturday when the Melodifestivalen kick-started, there was a big boat show in Älvsjö and it is still going on, there was a football match in Solna with more than 5,000 people.
As we all know, the health situation in Sweden in terms of the number of doctors and intensive care units is not good either. To give an example, in the whole of Lombardy, which counts more or less the same inhabitants as in Sweden, there are 900 ICU while in the whole of Sweden there are 500. Not to mention the number of medical nurses etc. and in general, but maybe this is a little more subjective, the historical ability to respond to stressful situations. At the national level in Italy, there are 5,000 ICUs compared to 500 ICUs in Sweden, which in proportion to the population are many more. I think this is the most dangerous moment ever in the Stockholm area, when there is an outbreak that the authorities believe is under control. If it were not so under control, as all countries so far, it is the moment where outbreaks of control + congregations and normal life will lead to an exponential increase in infection. I would like to invite everyone to take the precautions we are not yet asking to take, for our own good and for the good of the community. Telecommunications activities whenever possible, avoid public transport and cramped spaces and limit social contacts as much as possible. We must start right now because the situation in Stockholm is dangerous in my opinion.
I received only one reply to this email, from a Swedish Professor Emeritus I have never met before (or after). He thanked me for the ‘insightful’ message and after I told him that I felt “really discouraged by the reactions I am getting here in the department, most people are underestimating the situation and making jokes about it” — a reference to one senior colleague that, after receiving my email, fake-coughed in my direction— he wondered:
[Maybe] is it an ingrown (and sociologically interesting) Swedish cultural convention? Nothing is dangerous and I myself has no responsibility. Others, or the collectivity (the village-community, the political party, the union, the church, the squire etc.), will take care of things for me.
Apart from the common culture, if there is such a thing, I personally will avoid crowds and as a pensionist I have the possibility to do so and instead concentrate on my book-manuscript in the computor.
Anyways, the weekly fika was eventually suspended and the University quickly moved to online teaching.
By March 13, the ‘Covid-19 Statement Italians in Sweden’ was ready to be distributed. Writing the document was not an easy task itself, as it entailed managing not a little amount of drama among people who never met each other. And in all this, I was the main contributor: a second-year PhD student in Political Science. In the end, the final version contained 13 names, but the total number of contributors was much higher. Some eventually decided not to sign it because “it would not make a difference anyway”, others could not because of conflict of interest, others always embraced the Swedish strategy and contributed mainly as an attempt to derail our efforts. Eventually, it was decided by vote to share the document on our social media but also to formally ask the Italian Embassy to forward it to the Swedish Health Authority.
Weeks passed, and, while I have no way to know how many people read and shared the document, I know that it has circulated, as I saw my original post on Facebook shared by Swedish people. However, I received an answer from the Italian Ambassador only after some weeks. In hindsight, I should’ve followed my instinct and just proceed to send it directly to the Swedish Health Authority (FoHM). In other words, the Ambassador wrote to us apologizing for the late reply, which was justified by the fact that, due to what was now officially declared a pandemic, the embassy was understaffed. He also reassured us that the Italian embassy had always been in contact with the Swedish health authorities. I translate from Italian an excerpt of the mail I received on March, 25th:
There is no doubt that the Swedish medical and political strategy in dealing with the spread of the coronavirus has been and is different from that of Italy and many other countries. Just today we had a conference call with the Deputy Director of the Swedish Health Agency [FoHM] who reaffirmed their utmost commitment to containing the epidemic. The data they have is that a good portion of the Swedish infected is, on average, younger [compared to the Italian average] and that there are practically no infections in the age group up to 14 years. Their strategy continues to be to separate the elderly from the rest of the population and not to fight (obviously with appropriate caution) the contagion among the youngest to raise the general immunity level of the population.
I do not mean to throw our (former) Ambassador under the bus. I actually feel for him, who went beyond his way to explain (and to many felt like justify) the Swedish strategy; just to have to write more than once in order to rectify the lies of the state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell. That he reprimanded the state epidemiologist twice was reported also on international news outlets such as The Washington Post. On March 11, he called out Anders Tegnell for his statement that “the Swedish health system would have much better prerogatives than those of Italy in managing the spread of the coronavirus infection”, pointing out that at the time “in Italy over 5000 beds in intensive care units (ICU), while thousands more would be available in case of need. Currently, only 10% of the infected need treatment in the ICU, using less than 6% of the available places. No one has so far contested the efficiency of the Italian National Health System in facing the challenge of the coronavirus infection”. He concluded this first press release by saying
The challenge against COVID-19 is not a football match, nor are opposing supporters hoping for the victory of their team in the stands: it is a common and epochal challenge to ensure the health of all, where the “best” are the thousands and thousands of doctors, nurses and health workers who in Italy are working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
I cried reading this. I do not mean to take anything away from the experience of people that experienced lock-downs firsthand, but I assure you: living the pandemic in a country whose officials constantly threw shade at your own — Italy — which was also one of the first countries to be hit by the pandemic, was an experience I would not wish to anyone. We, the foreign residents of Sweden, never got to have some closure, or even properly mourn for our countries, the world, the Sweden we thought we knew. However, this email also proves that the Italian Ambassador, and most likely the representatives of other embassies, knew, as of early March 2020, that the goal of FhOM was that of herd immunity (something that they are now denying, despite a number of public emails and endless news articles implying quite the opposite).
In April, one month before the Italian Ambassador had to respond once again to Tegnell’s statement:
“In a modern and rich country like Sweden we should have better protected the elderly, referring to the situation at the time in China and Italy, both countries with fewer resources than Sweden to manage a pandemic. Sweden as a society could have managed the pandemic better”
I, and other critics of the Swedish strategy, were drawing the attention of the international press. Some of the videos I posted on my Twitter were even shared by international news outlet from the United States to Australia, from Norway to Japan.
However, this sort of notoriety was not well received by our fellow citizens. Swedish academic Camelia Dewan recently wrote an excellent piece explaining the Law of Jante, jantelagen in Swedish, as “a complex set of social norms that promote ideals of egalitarianism, while at the same time discourage going against group consensus or standing out from the crowd”. I had people accusing me and others to be looking for a spotlight, while others, especially in academia, warned me not to say anything as it was “too early” to know, and that “only time will tell”. The implication was that exposing myself against the mainstream corona strategy would have consequences on my future career.
Remember when, in the beginning, I said that Swedish academia was an unexpectedly egalitarian environment characterized (apparently) by a very flat hierarchy? At this point, I realized that indeed it was not the case. All of a sudden, I was just an inexperienced early-stage researcher, whose field is in humanities. But I also found myself drawing the few colleagues that were critic or even just dubious about the Swedish strategy, sometimes physically coming to my office to whisper their doubts — similarly to when some colleagues wanted to discuss anything that would fall outside the opinion-corridor (in Swedish åsiktskorridor) prior to the pandemic. Vladan Lausevic has written about this phenomenon, and, while it is interesting to read the whole explanation, for this article’s purposes it’s enough to say that “the opinion-corridor means the existence of a norm where opinions and positions that are “differing” are being categorically rejected”. Since my research evolves around climate change-induced migration and is sometimes critical of the current refugee framework, I had time to get accustomed to the opinion-corridor and its manifestations, including the uncomfortable, tentative whispers it included.
For months, even wearing a mask in crowded places was seen as something subversive in Sweden — despite the fact that, already in April, the literature on the efficacy of masks was mushrooming, as well as recommendations by International Organizations. Among those, it is worth mentioning the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), based in Stockholm, which is a report recommended the use of masks “in the community by individuals who are not ill in order to reduce potential pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic transmission of COVID-19 from the mask wearer to others”. As reported, among others, by ScienceMag, Anders Tegnell “sent an email to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) expressing concern about proposed new advice that face masks worn in public could slow the spread of the pandemic coronavirus”. To date, FoHM still has to provide detailed information in Swedish (not to mention English or other languages such as Arabic, so to include us, the foreign residents) regarding, among other things, the different types of masks, or even how to properly use them. As reported by Krisinformation.se, the portal for Emergency Information from Swedish Authorities,
The Public Health Agency of Sweden does not currently recommend the widespread use of masks in the community. However if you choose to wear a mask, it is important that it is done correctly.
I am so relieved to have witnessed increasingly more people wearing masks in my city, starting approximately in November last year. During the first months of the pandemic, I may have seen a grand total of a dozen people wearing masks in public. No, I do not think that masks are “the silver bullet against Covid-19”, nor I am unaware of the fact that people misuse them. However, I take this as a signal that times are changing, and this country that I have loved since the first time I landed is finally waking up from the collective cognitive dissonance induced by FoHM and its top bureaucrats. Yes, the virus is airborne: why do not use masks, then? Not even in retirement homes or in hospital wards? Why are visors acceptable instead? Why the relatives of elderly residents were forbidden, for months, to see their loved ones, but the staff, even temporary, could do so, many of them with children attending schools and family members out in society? What was the difference?
Why is no one willing to discuss the fact that thousands of elderly have been, de facto, euthanized through the administration of palliative care (morphine rather than oxygen) without even being visited by a doctor nor having their families informed? I tried to raise this topic with a number of Swedish people, and the reaction was always the same: an uncomfortable fidgeting on their chair and a quick change of topic.
And here, to wrap up, I finally get back to one of my initial points.
In Sweden, I could finally I could let my guard down, unlearn how activate all my senses if a man entered my wagon on the train. I did not need to carry a pepper spray in each pocket everywhere I went (by the way: pepper sprays are illegal in Sweden), I was not afraid to be harassed, catcalled, or followed. What I felt like, was as that finally I was not primarily a young woman who walks this world feeling so naked sometimes: most of the weight coming from the toxic looks of both men and women was somehow lift from my shoulders. No one paid attention to me, to how I looked or what I wore.
During the pandemic, this was not the case any longer. I am a foreigner, one of the favourite scapegoats of Anders Tegnell. I am a woman. Since I started wearing a mask in public, I have been terrified. I resumed walking with self-defence devices in each pocket, and to be alert at all times when wearing my mask. There have been many, too many accounts of people that have been harassed or even assaulted because they were wearing a mask, and many (if not the majority, according to my observations) of them are women. One of the absurdities of this situation is that in the Sweden I know and I have lived in prior to the pandemic, discrimination and harassment towards foreigners, especially women, because of something they want to wear would be absolutely unacceptable. My understanding is that, in order to be comfortable and unbothered in Sweden during these pandemic times, one has to stick to the opinion-corridor and Jantelagen: do not openly criticize the national strategy, do not think you know better than our (favourite) expert. This is curious, considering that in February 2021, the Swedish strategy as reported on the official government website was changed from:
The overall goal of the government’s work is to reduce the rate of the spread of infection, i.e. to flatten the curve so that not many people get sick at the same time
into:
The overall goal of the government’s work is to reduce the spread of infection in society
Moreover, it should be worth noting that Anders Tegnell formal education in epidemiology does not consist of a Doctorate or even an MSc, but rather a one-year long-distance learning course at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, which took him over four years to complete. However, this now iconic bureaucrat, in which honour many people have tattooed their skin, has been one of the only voices that counted during this pandemic. To date, children under 16 are still required to attend school. Anders Tegnell has always claimed that children are not drivers of the infection and minimized pre- and asymptomatic contagion. However, few dare to publicly challenge his authority, or even to ask where his data came from.
When a group of 22 scientists wrote a joint opinion column arguing for a drastic change of strategy, they have been ridiculed and delegitimised, with a hint of misogyny, as another Swedish academic, Gina Gustavsson, wrote in the Guardian. A real mud campaign has been reserved to the critics of Tegnell, often including personal attacks. Cecilia Söderberg-Nauclér, one of the 22, confronted Tegnell and asked for the data on which he based his modelling — and the state epidemiologist hung the phone in her face. Eventually, Prof. Nauclér deactivated her Twitter account, where she drew criticisms— but also praise — at every tweet.
I hope that the price that critics of Tegnell and other FoHM figures will not be too high to pay. After all, what we ask from them is to base their modelling on reliable data and scientific research (rather than “gut feelings”), as well as to align with the majority of the world in following the WHO and ECDC guidelines. After, we will hopefully assess the appropriated fora eventual individual responsibilities.
*
update 20201–02–03
Independent journalist Emanuel Karlsten on Twitter reports FoHM’s answer in relation to the quote from the former Italian Ambassador: “I spoke to Anders [Wallensten, NA] and this is not a quote from him. He does not recognize that he would have said in this way as described. It is an interpretation someone made. WE can state that as a quote it is not true.” I would like to point out that there is plenty of evidence that contradicts this statement: while he may “not recognize that he would have said in this way as described”, there is plenty of evidence regarding various FoHM officials making statements on the desirability of herd immunity, including during the period of March 2020. Please refer once again to this thread and to this video from FoHM’s press conference of April, 23rd, in which Anders Wallensten says, and I quote, “nackdelen med en lockdown helt är att det inte blir så mycket smittspridning […]”; in English: “a bad thing with a lockdown is that there is not much of a spread of infection”. I embed the original video so that it might refresh his memory.
https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1342437226341412864/pu/vid/640x360/fPpeu_7MYfbFpF4w.mp4?tag=10
