CHAPTER 10: The Swedish Approach to COVID-19

The Swedish approach to coronavirus disease 2019 differed significantly from that taken by other countries during the first wave, mainly due to constitutional and structural constraints that prevented the kind of strict legally enforced restrictions that were used in other countries. However, over the course of the second wave, the Swedish government changed course, and its actions increasingly came to resemble those taken by other Western countries, with the main difference being that the restrictions in Sweden largely continued to be characterized by voluntarism. The primary reason for this is likely the Swedish constitution, which hindered the government from making most of its restrictions legally enforcible.