Daily: Sweden’s Corona gamble

The Bunker

Podmasters

News, Politics, Society & Culture, Government

4.6 • 984 Ratings

🗓️ 23 April 2020

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

While the rest of Europe locked down, Sweden took a different and much looser path on dealing with COVID. Is their controversial approach working? Is Sweden right to measure itself against a longer-term tally of suffering caused by the virus’s economic consequences, and not just the immediate death toll? Andrew Brown, author of Fishing in Utopia: Sweden and the Future that Disappeared talks to Ros Taylor about the biggest COVID gamble in Europe. “There’s a view that everyone is pursuing the Swedish strategy, whether they know it or not.” “This is a fairly brutal way of doing it. But Sweden’s view is that the facts are brutal.” “Swedish opinion is like a shoal of herring. They all head in the same direction together – but that direction can change suddenly.” “The Swedish government can be extremely bossy – but part of the technique of social control was to deny that it existed.” Presented by Ros Taylor. Produced by Andrew Harrison. Assistant producer Jacob Archbold. Music by Kenny Dickinson. Audio production by Alex Rees. THE BUNKER is a Podmasters Production. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	My name is Stan. I'm at. Nice to meet you. So you took up photography where? I've always loved
0:05.5	photography but I turn it into earning a living at 60. I enrolled on a day course.
0:11.8	Well college. I loved going to college. It's good you can retry. I'm enrolled on the day course. But college?
0:13.0	I loved going to college.
0:14.0	It's good you can retrain and do something.
0:16.0	Yeah, yeah.
0:17.0	Let's talk about working, learning, saving and making the most of living longer.
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0:55.3	look after theirs with dental life. Pick up dental life in the pet food aisle. Hello and welcome back to the bunker daily I'm Rod Taylor.
1:11.6	Most European countries lock down once the scale of the crisis became apparent, some later than others.
1:18.0	But one took a different approach, Sweden.
1:21.0	People are urged to socially distance, but schools, cafes, gyms and restaurants have stayed open.
1:27.0	Gathering of more than 50 people are banned, but parents are told to send their kids to school unless they are actually ill, even if a sibling or
1:34.4	parent is sick. Why does Sweden have a different strategy and is it working?
1:40.5	Joining me is Andrew Brown, author of Fishing in Utopia, a book about Swedish culture and politics which won the Orwell Prize in 2009 and a former journalist at The Guardian and the Independent.
1:52.0	He lived in Sweden as a young man and has regularly
1:55.3	revisited it since. Hello Andrew. Morning. In the UK morning. In the UK we saw
2:02.2	intense public pressure to lock down after countries like France and Italy did so.
	...

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