Is Covid-19 testing the limits of Swedish trust?

One year into the Covid-19 pandemic, Sweden still hasn’t imposed a lockdown. Instead, the country’s controversial strategy has relied on voluntary measures and a tradition of mutual trust between Swedes and their government. But was this social contract equipped for a pandemic?

Credits: Jann Lipka/imagebank.sweden.se

“I'll never be stupid enough to have a man's name tattooed on me again,” Angelina Jolie avowed after her second divorce. Luckily, she had only tattooed his name and not his face. Most importantly, the man was not Anders Tegnell. Gustav Lloyd Agerblad was less foresightful. The 32-year-old made international headlines last April after etching the Swedish state epidemiologist’s face onto his arm in support of the country’s unconventional Covid-19 strategy. It was seen as yet another manifestation of Swedes' high trust in their public authorities and institutions – a characteristic cited ambitiously to explain why Sweden of all countries hasn’t implemented a lockdown, not least by the country’s public authorities and institutions themselves. But for something with such high stakes, this idea of “trust” itself has evaded examination surprisingly well. Even if only out of curiosity, we should be asking questions: what does it mean, in practice, for a country to have a high level of trust?

It was on March 11, 2020, that the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic. Almost a year has passed since the rest of Europe started to close down, and it became increasingly clear that Sweden wasn’t planning to. While the rest of the world more or less proceeded to mandate face-masks, the Swedish Public Health Agency waited until January 2021 to even recommend it, and even then it was only about public transport (for certain people, on certain days, at certain times). As the strategy’s main architect, Tegnell immediately became a controversial figure in international media.

That’s why when schools in the UK closed last spring and I went home to Sweden, I struggled to make sense of his precipitous popularity over here. Tegnell’s face was on T-shirts, phone cases, Christmas tree angels, and I found out that he had not one, but two fan clubs on Facebook. In a way, I could see why he was so likeable; calm, stoic and mundane, he comes across as just the type of scientist you’d be inclined to trust. But things began to slide from mere trust into the territories of a personality cult. As best summed up by Tegnell himself, it was “not even funny anymore.”

“If you tattoo Anders Tegnell onto your body, it is close to what’s called blind trust. You could actually say that it is, because we don’t know yet whether the strategy chosen by Tegnell and the Public Health Agency has been the best – we haven’t seen the end of this. If the trust increases very strongly and the Public Health Agency’s strategy doesn’t turn out to be good, it will be quite bad,” said Bo Rothstein, a Swedish professor of political science, when asked about the tattoo phenomenon back in April 2020. Could it be that what we call “trust”  is actually naivety?

Ten months later, the verdict has arrived. Sweden’s tightening restrictions and looming third wave seem to imply that the initial strategy hasn’t been a success – and turns out, Swedes are not so gullible after all. A recent survey by Ipsos for Dagens Nyheter showed that Prime Minister Stefan Löfven’s approval rating had tumbled from to an all-time low of 26 per cent in January 2021 from 49 per cent in May 2020. Since October, people’s trust in the Public Health Agency had declined to 49 per cent from 68, and even for the once-legendary Tegnell, it was down to 54 per cent from 72. It should come as a relief that we are not blindly trusting our authorities as Rothstein had feared, but the survey results are still concerning; they are telling us that the authorities were once doing something right to deserve our trust in them, and now they are doing something wrong to be losing it.

When speaking of high trust levels, it is not just a matter of Swede to government, but also Swede to Swede. Levels of interpersonal trust in the country have been recorded since the 1990s, and on a 1-10 scale, a consistent 55 to 61 per cent have reported 7-10 when asked “According to your view, to what extent can one trust people in general?”. Internationally, this places Sweden at the top of the lists. Whilst seemingly an abstract feature of Swedish society, trust is in fact deeply embedded in its very structure. It can be seen as a product of the strong welfare state, but also its prerequisite: the high taxes that fund it would be difficult to collect if Swedes did not trust the government to spend them fairly, or fellow Swedes to pay their taxes too.

The same social contract underpins the Swedish Covid-19 strategy. Given the high trust in public authorities, they can rely on the people to follow their advice voluntarily, and given the citizens’ trust in each other, they should trust others to do so too. To an extent, this has happened. Since the pandemic’s start, the proportion of Swedes working exclusively from home has seen a tenfold increase, and in a survey last spring, 93 per cent of respondents claimed to have reduced social contact. Contrary to popular belief, life in Sweden has not continued as normal and considering that these changes have been responses to recommendations, not restrictions, they are quite remarkable. As often noted, the Swedish strategy is “Swedish” for a reason – it relies on the shared trust between Swedes.

The question is whether us Swedes, in our day-to-day lives, are really that distinct from other people. The “trusting” Swedes, the “touchy and huggy” Italians, the “compliant” Chinese, the “defiant” Americans – it remains an epidemiological mystery how the same pandemic can look so different from country to country, and these archetypes look like clues. But we need to use them carefully. We always should, but especially in a pandemic, because what is the glaring message of that haunting sombrero shape, if not that a single non-compliant individual may be all that it takes? Before the pandemic, a paper from the University of Gothenburg exposed that, indeed, not all Swedes can afford to trust. Employed Swedes trust more than unemployed Swedes. Swedes in good health trust more than Swedes in bad health. For those who already felt betrayed by the safety net, the caveats in Sweden’s high trust narrative are no news. Their doubts were always there – only previously disguised by a sturdily high average.

Some other caveats are, of course, unique to this pandemic – ones that can turn even the most trusting and trustworthy of Swedes into super-spreaders. Those caveats are, of course, asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic transmissions. Conveniently, the Swedish Public Health Agency has remained methodologically doubtful about this too, stating on their website that, given the varying results of studies, their judgement remains that “transmission from individuals without symptoms represents a minor part.” Combine this with a late start to both testing and household quarantine, and it really doesn’t matter anymore how much the Swedes trust. The virus will spread, even in Sweden. And so it has, as the total death count continues to climb beyond 13,000, compared to just over 600 in the neighbouring Norway.

It’s strange. Trust is, in any other thinkable context, perceived as something so fragile. Yet, even as the pandemic turned the rest of our societies upside-down, we expected “Swedish trust” to remain constant. The past year has tested its limits, both to what it can withstand and what it can achieve, and the results are already abundantly clear: tattoo ink may not fade, but trust certainly can. Let this be a reminder to treat both with care.

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