All through the pandemic in Europe, Sweden has remained an outlier in terms of imposing restrictions on its citizens. They did institute a broad vaccination program and even imposed some travel restrictions during some of the heavier surges, but the touch of the government on people’s lives was always lighter than in most other European nations. But now, with the Omicron variant surge seeming to have leveled off and begun to recede, Sweden has announced that they are basically done with all of it. Having already reversed most of their other restrictions, the Swedes will no longer even be conducting mass COVID testing, operating large, public testing centers, or shipping free test kits to everyone. The head of the Swedish Public Health Agency has concluded that it’s simply not worth the cost any longer and people need to just get on with their lives. (Associated Press)

Sweden has halted wide-scale testing for COVID-19 even among people showing symptoms of an infection, putting an end to the mobile city-square tent sites, drive-in swab centers and home-delivered tests that became ubiquitous during the pandemic and provided essential data for tracking its spread.

The move puts the Scandinavian nation at odds with most of Europe, but some experts say it could become the norm as costly testing yields fewer benefits with the easily transmissible but milder omicron variant and as governments begin to consider treating COVID-19 like they do other endemic illnesses.

“We have reached a point where the cost and relevance of the testing is no longer justifiable.” Swedish Public Health Agency chief Karin Tegmark Wisell told the national broadcast SVT this week.

Interestingly, Sweden has experienced a total of 16,244 deaths to date out of a population of 10.3 million (0.15%). Meanwhile, France lost 131,000 people from a population of 67 million (0.19%), despite having imposed much more stringent restrictions. Take from that what you will, but the very different approaches the two nations took do not appear to have made much of a difference. If anything, Sweden suffered fewer per capita deaths than France.

A significant part of this decision does indeed seem to have been driven by economic considerations and the Public Health Agency was being honest about that. They’ve been spending more than $220 million per month on testing and their budget is not inexhaustible. Starting today, health care and elderly care workers will still be eligible for free test kits (which seems reasonable) but everyone else will need to rely on their normal healthcare provider services if they want to be tested.

The one place where this new policy will affect people directly involves those who travel internationally. When going to a country that requires a negative test prior to entry, Swedes will not be reimbursed for the cost of a COVID test and a certificate showing their negative status. Of course, if their neighboring countries weren’t still imposing all of those travel restrictions, it wouldn’t be an issue.

Back in the United States, a number of mandates are already starting to fall by the wayside. The day is certainly coming when we won’t be wildly testing everyone far and wide either. As even the Democrats have come to realize, people are sick of it. Officials still pushing mandates and restrictions are seeing their internal polling numbers turning into a dumpster fire. At some point, we’re going to go through a reckoning and figure out just how badly we screwed up this entire pandemic response from the beginning. And by “we” I don’t just mean Fauci or the CDC or the federal government. I mean pretty much the entire world. We’ve now spent two years obsessing over the test results and new case numbers every day like a bunch of gambling addicts watching the results come in from the race track. The damage to the economy, to our businesses, and to our schools and our children from all of this may never be fully known. But it’s hard to avoid noticing the early lessons we may be seeing from Sweden this week and wondering if much of this pandemic drama wasn’t all just a massive overreaction.