I am ashamed how my country handled this pandemic and I'm ashamed that my fellow citizens are more interested in managing the public image of Sweden rather than learning from obvious mistakes.
I am therefore thankful that Nature published this. It has been debated since early 2020, but the narrative of Swedish exceptionalism is so strong, especially on the Internet, that I wouldn't be surprised if this will tried to be burried.
I have lost friends due to this, not because people have died of Covid but because foreign nationals, who moved to Sweden to work on some of the famous tech companies, have realized how poorly Sweden handled the pandemic. They have now moved to other countries instead.
I always thought this was an American thing, but turns out just about every nation has this to some extent.
There's a deep irony in this sentence.
Note that this paper is published in "Nature Humanities and Social Sciences Communications" journal, not in the plain "Nature" journal that is a totally different journal published by the same editorial. I'd also thrust more a pare published in one of the many journals of Nature that has something about medicine or biology in the title, because the reviewers and editors are more specialized in this subject. https://www.nature.com/siteindex
It's still peer reviewed, and I'm still waiting for the links to papers which say that Sweden did an exceptional job.
The discussion of the science of childrens psychological health for example was curiously absent in countries that argued that science demanded swift lockdowns. Is a life-year in lockdown for a school aged child as “lost” as a year shorter lifespan for an elderly person? Or less? Or more?
These are ethical and political questions more than they are scientific.
These ethical problems and differences in how they are handled are present even absent a pandemic. Who’s given intensive care over a certain age for example is likely very different in the US and Sweden. That’s not because the medical facts differ or doctors in either end act on bad science or in bad faith. Medicine isn’t just science, it’s ethics, politics, economics too.
That’s why “you don’t need a mask” was just a lie to conserve masks for healthcare workers.
Is that following the science?
Many conventional wisdoms we're overturned during these last couple of years. Saving mask for the health care services might have been a reasonable thing to do 20 years ago. But today with Chinese extreme mass production it is entirely feasible in rich states to equip their populations with sofisticated face masks and test for virus infection with anti-gen tests several times every week.
It's a new world.
The reassessments haven't been about learning how masks work but about how a particular virus spreads and the efficacy of various types of masks in various settings between parties of varying contagion levels. The advice also has to be grounded in practicality given current circumstances (supply constraints, rate of asymptomatic spread among vaccinated populations, etc)