Despite initial suggestions that the COVID-19 pandemic affected everyone
equally, it quickly became clear that some were much worse affected than others.
Marginalization—including poverty, substandard accommodation, precarious or
no employment, reduced access to healthcare and other key public goods—was
clearly correlated with higher rates of both contagion and fatality. For Sweden,
COVID-19 inequality could be seen along clear racial and socio-economic lines,
with some of the first high death rates seen amongst Somali communities,
where individuals had contracted the virus through unsafe employment as taxi
drivers transporting wealthier Swedes home from their winter holidays. At the
same time, actors on the extra parliamentarian far-right in Sweden were quick
to blame the country’s relatively high per-capita fatality rate on persons born
outside Sweden working in the healthcare and care home sector. Media frames
a rming racial stereotypes grounded in cultural racism circulated across the
ecosystem of alternative media in the country. In both healthcare and the media,
we see growing forms of exclusion disproportionately aecting migrants. Such
intertwined exclusions in Sweden, as the article argues, are a sign of a wider
disintegration of Swedish society in which individuals lose trust in both the core
institutions as well as across different parts of society. Drawing on Davina Cooper’s
understanding of the relationship between the state and other public institutions
with individuals as based on “touch,” the article explores how exclusionary
practices impact this relationship. Our key argument is that, whilst ostensibly
such practices often most materially hurt minority groups (e.g., migrants), they
are indicative of—and accelerate—a broader disintegration of society through
undermining a logic of “care” necessary to sustain social bonds.