"Sweden's Relaxed Approach to the Coronavirus Could Already Be Backfiring"/"Why Sweden's Lax Coronavirus Approach Could Be Backfiring."

2 headlines for an article that went up yesterday at TIME. The first one is the main headline on the article. The second one is the form it takes as it appears at the top of the "most popular" list in the sidebar over there.

There's such a difference between calling the Swedish approach "relaxed" and calling it "lax." "Relaxed" sounds more like freedom and ease. "Lax" sounds like negligence.

But Sweden did experiment with a lax/relaxed approach — perhaps you think the U.S. could have done that — and we can look at the results:

As many public spaces throughout Europe empty out—with citizens only leaving home for essential groceries or medication—life in Sweden is carrying on, mostly as usual. Children walk to school while adults meet up for dinner at their local bar. Only the vulnerable have been advised to isolate and some are working from home. Yet in Sweden, where there are 9,141 confirmed cases and 793 people have died, experts worry weaker measures may be leading to a more severe outbreak in the country of just 10 million citizens.
Sweden has a relatively high case fatality rate: as of April 8, 7.68% of the Swedes who have tested positive for COVID-19 have died of the virus. Neighboring countries, like Norway and Denmark, have case fatality rates of 1.46% and 3.85% respectively. (The U.S. case fatality rate is 3.21%.) While Sweden’s elevated case fatality rate could be a result of its low testing rates compared to its neighbors, experts say Sweden’s laissez-faire approach could also be to blame....

Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s chief epidemiologist overseeing the government’s response to COVID-19 has said the government should allow the virus to spread slowly through the population, an approach initially employed by the United Kingdom and the Netherlands before both countries rapidly changed strategy amid mounting evidence that this approach would still overburden health care systems....     

[I]nterpersonal distance is valued in Swedish culture and 40% of Swedish households are single-person households without children.... And Swedes have above-average confidence in their politicians, who in turn, trust citizens to follow their advice....

All that is to say that the results of the Swedish experiment are not automatically transferable to other countries. What might have worked for them would not carry over to places where people don't already maintain physical distance from each other, where there are lots children, and where people don't accept and follow the rules laid down by government.

I'm just assuming that TIME is accurately describing Swedish culture, but you get the idea. One country can experiment and we can see the results and perhaps decide to do things that way. But doing the same thing in a different place might yield very different results, and, in any case, at this point, we might say things are not going so well in Sweden, so it's more an example of what not to do.

And yet, we are still in the middle of things. We'll have to wait to know the long-term benefits and losses in the lax/relaxed approach used in Sweden.

As for the idea that different places should use different policies, we have something of that in the United States, at least as long as the federal government gives state and local government a strong role in making the decisions.