Chapter Three - It Begins
Just to avoid any misunderstandings, “It Begins”, is obviously not referring to the pandemic itself, which was clearly well underway (for example, the national lockdowns in Italy were introduced on the 8th of March), but rather my inglorious “career” as a Twitter hothead. As I look through my tweets from March and April of 2020, I’m again surprised to find that I was just as late to join the fray as my understanding of the pandemic was inadequate.
My Twitter handle at the time was @Anders87636894 and I had a total of zero (0) followers. Since I'd created this new account in August 2019, I’d kept my intention of staying out of pointless political discussions. In total I’d written about 50 tweets, almost all about hockey. The first time I even mentioned “corona” was on the 14th of March, in an embarrassingly weak attempt at a joke to the former club manager of Timrå IK about a Swedish reality competition show:
My next tweets followed 10 days later, on the 24th of March, in which I “discuss” the pandemic and compare it to the Spanish flu, in a thread started by Greta Thunberg where she states that she’s quarantined herself after coming back from a trip to Central Europe.
Obviously, I knew very little about the Spanish flu and just as little about covid-19, but I didn’t let that stop me lecturing this now suspended moron – considering it was in reply to Greta Thunberg, it wouldn’t be too far-fetched to assume it was some troll who thinks climate change is a hoax. (As a thought experiment, it would be interesting to know how bad covid-19 would have been in 1919 and how we would have dealt with the Spanish flu, had it appeared in 2020.) The screenshot illustrates a recurring problem with a “review” of this kind: Many have left the platform since troll-in-chief Elon took over, others have been suspended or have deleted their accounts or some of their tweets and others yet, including some of the most “interesting” people involved in the Twitter pandemic, have locked their accounts, which means that sometimes the complete story is forever lost, unfortunately.
A few days later it seems my thinking had evolved from Spanish flu disaster to getting behind the "flatten the curve" narrative which was all the rage for a while there in Spring 2020. The original poster has deleted their tweet, so just like with the thread above, exactly what caused my outburst is lost, but judging by my reply it seems the person was saying something about the situation in Sweden I didn't quite agree with...
On the 31st of March I had my first exchange with a proper lockdown proponent. Tellingly it was a disgruntled expat whose argument was that the current situation in Sweden was just as bad as it had been in Lombardy a few weeks earlier and his original tweet was replete with hashtags, something which would characterise many of the most vocal critics of the Swedish strategy:
He also made this prediction on the same day, agreeing with someone who's since been suspended from Twitter:
As we all know, although the healthcare system was under a lot of pressure, there was no "chaos" and what happened in Lombardy was not repeated in Sweden. When I asked for an update on the 2nd of April, I got no reply:
When the predicted chaos failed to materialise, the attention instead turned to how deaths were reported and that the stats were manipulated and unreliable.
I pointed out that there was data suggesting that Sweden's figures seemed to be quite accurate and that the number of deaths in many other countries were underreported. I was told I was "annoying" and "cherrypicking". Of course we now know (and in fairness, it was always known) that the stats coming out of Sweden and the other Nordic countries are among the most trustworthy in the world, and it's in large measures due to the "Big Brothery" use of civic registration numbers.
So that's how I on the last day of March 2020 was dragged into the Twitter pandemic, but in all honesty, even if I had never seen the Austrian's misguided tweets, sooner or later I would have found some other outrageous misrepresentation of the situation in Sweden which would have triggered my keyboard warrior mode. I finished the day replying to another tweet with the hashtag #SwedeninDenial. Unfortunately the original poster has recently deleted his Twitter account - the tweet was still there when I checked a few weeks ago. I suppose you can't really blame people for deserting Twitter following Elon's coming out as a chainsaw-wielding Nazi...Anyway, the poster, if I remember correctly, was an environmental engineer making the case for lockdowns and how Sweden seemed not to have taken strong enough measures to "bend the curve". The woman whose tweet I replied to would, become one of the "22 scientists" who were very critical of the Swedish strategy and later formed the association "Vetenskapsforum Covid-19", of which there will be much to say, at a later stage. Back in March 2020 she still referred to herself as a "whistle-blower".
Her second tweet in this thread contains another tweet of hers from the 9th of March, in which there's a link to a very interesting article: Minimizing Coronavirus’ impact is a race against time - this chart explains why | World Economic Forum
Firstly, it contains the now legendary "flatten the curve" illustration, which was omnipresent in the early discussions of how to deal with the pandemic. So when our "whistle-blower" says she *knows* "it's already too late" she is convinced that the healthcare in Sweden would collapse under the burden of the pandemic. That narrative would change drastically later.
Secondly, the article contains a ranking of "The Countries Best Prepared to Deal with a Pandemic". I wonder if the Global Health Security Index has since evaluated their findings...?
As we entered April 2020 I had been in Sweden for less than two weeks and had written a total of 15 tweets about covid-19, eight of which on the 31st of March, but now the floodgates were open and apart from some further, sometimes less than constructive, back and forth with my Austrian friend, I got into a number of arguments, quite often with expats, for example with a person from the UK who argued that the trajectory of the Swedish curve was worse than Italy's.
This person didn't seem to think that Sweden had introduced any mitigation measures to "slow or stop the spread" and even stated that "Sweden has not actually acted yet", and this was on April 4(!).
I was also pleased to see that there were some people on Twitter whom I felt were trying to argue rationally, one of whom was Björn Fagerstedt whose tweets I came across for the first time on April 3. I tried to provide a few words of encouragement. Unfortunately Björn has recently more or less left Twitter because of Elon's antics, but of course you couldn't blame him.
By April 6 my polemics had borne fruit and I had acquired my first follower! Unfortunately I don't remember who it was, but I felt the occasion warranted me uploading a profile picture (a picture of my T-shirt with a picture of former Timrå IK head coach Tommy Andersson and the text "Uno Bitches!" - an in-joke from 2012. I clearly didn't think of myself as a pandemic Twitterhaverist yet...).
Before we move on to the events during the rest of April, a very eventful month in the development of the pandemic and the discussions regarding the Swedish strategy, it's time to introduce one of the main characters of the drama.
