Politicians in Sweden were ready to close schools, too, but Tegnell and Giesecke insisted on weighing costs and benefits, as Tegnell had done in a 2009 article reviewing studies of school closures during pandemics. The article had warned that the closures might have little or no effect on viral spread and would cause enormous economic damage, disproportionately harm students and workers in low-income families, and create staff shortages in the health-care system by forcing parents to stay home with young children. Given all those dangers, plus early Covid data showing that schoolchildren were not dangerously spreading the virus, Tegnell and Giesecke successfully fought to keep elementary schools and junior high schools open—without masks, plastic partitions, social distancing, or regular Covid tests for students.

They remained rational when politicians around the world were frightened into full lockdowns by Neil Ferguson’s team of researchers at Imperial College London in mid-March 2020. Ferguson’s computer model projected that Covid would kill more than 2 million Americans and 500,000 Britons by the end of the summer, and that there would soon be 30 Covid patients for every available hospital bed in intensive-care units. The “only viable strategy,” the modelers concluded, was a lockdown strategy like China’s.

Never mind that this strategy had been carefully considered and rejected in the various pre-2020 pandemic plans prepared by the WHO, the CDC, and the health agencies of Canada, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and other countries.