My Experiences of the COVID-19 Pandemic So Far

In this essay, I share my personal and my family’s experiences of living in the middle of a pandemic in Sweden. Interestingly, due to severe health problems in the family, the pandemic for half a year was a non-issue. As a background for my essay, I present information about the diffusion of the coronavirus in Sweden during the three first waves and about the special Swedish strategy to combat the virus. The Swedish strategy was criticized heavily abroad by politicians and media despite that there before the large outbreak of the pandemic in Europe had been a widespread agreement among the state epidemiologists in the EU to follow a strategy to combat the pandemic of the kind Sweden adopted. I also highlight how public policy authority is divided between the government, the central governmental agencies, the regions and the municipalities, which all according to the Swedish constitution have an independent standing and each have their own areas of responsibility. This explains why the governmental agency the Public Health Agency took the lead in the anti-COVID measures in Sweden and not the Swedish government. At the end, I also present my own preliminary personal evaluation of the way the Swedish authorities dealt with the pandemic.