In this chapter, I study the political reasoning of the Norwegian and Swedish states during the pandemic, guided by the second research question of my book—how do the Norwegian and Swedish states render reality governable?—as I study the rationalizations and problematizations underpinning the Swedish and Norwegian response. To answer this question, I review public sources. Answering this question fills an empirical gap, insofar as the political rationality of the Swedish state, while analysed at a theoretical level through explorations of the politics of COVID-19 in Sweden, has not been discussed empirically in consideration of a systematic analysis of the Swedish state actors’ articulations. Therefore, the biopolitical and socio-political discourses of the Swedish state and their internal contradictions have been left aside until now. In Norway, the break between liberalism and biopolitics in early March 2020 has been studied, but no study has handled how the Norwegian state’s discourses underpin the political responses beyond references to biopolitics’ primacy. Therefore, the Norwegian case would benefit from a richer general study of how problematizations and rationalizations render reality governable, especially when this is done comparatively by discussing how these two states’ discourses relate to one another at the end of the chapter. This chapter, covering the political reasoning of the states, offers both empirical answers to the riddle of why Sweden and Norway acted differently, and offers theoretical lessons, showing how institutionally, culturally and politically similar states can act radically differently if they perceive the situation differently, as state agency can be played out in various ways due to state autonomy.