Refusing to put 10 million people under house arrest without trial was lambasted. The most revered sources were quick to call Sweden names when the little Scandinavian nation stuck (largely) to established pandemic response policies. Super-governmental bodies and legacy media outlets treated this like a dangerous experiment. In fact, brave Sweden was the only nation to (mostly) hold the line against an authoritarian mania.
The evidence available at the time was strongly in favour of Sweden’s refusal to lock down. Subsequent data agrees. Yet many of those loud voices calling for a grotesque, systemic denial of liberties are quiet. Some pig-headedly maintain that Sweden was wrong. A few contort reality to claim that Sweden actually did lock down.
Many proponents of lockdowns now have a natural immunity to facts and logic. But few things are as important today as showing the horror of lockdowns to those still open to reason. Lockdowns must be banished to history’s malodorous trash heap of shame.
The established position
First, let’s ascertain what part of the Covid response was “experimental”. (I use that term loosely. No part of lockdowns lived up to the rules and principles of a genuine experiment.)
On this there is little ambiguity. Existing guidelines were universally not in favour of lockdowns.
Below is a portion of a table from a WHO document published in 2019 called “Non-pharmaceutical public health measures for mitigating the risk and impact of epidemic and pandemic influenza”. Responses “Not recommended in any circumstances” include the keystones of lockdowns: contact tracing, quarantine of exposed individuals, entry and exit screening, border closure and internal travel restrictions.
Published academic papers say similar things. Here I pick just one paper to highlight this. In “Disease Mitigation Measures in the Control of Pandemic Influenza”, published in 2006 in Biosecurity and Bioterrorism: Biodefense Strategy, Practice, and Science, we’re told that “there are no historical observations or scientific studies that support confinement by quarantine of groups of possibly infected people for extended periods in order to slow the spread of influenza”. It goes on, “A World Health Organization (WHO) Writing Group, after reviewing the literature and considering contemporary international experience, concluded that ‘forced isolation and quarantine are ineffective and impractical’”.
Sweden also followed its own pandemic-response plans. As Moonstone puts it, linking to the official website (in Swedish), “The country largely stuck to its pandemic plan, originally developed to be used in the event of an influenza pandemic. Instead of lockdowns, the goal was to achieve social distancing through public health recommendations.”
In short, prior to late 2019, scarcely anyone recommended anything nearly as stupid and damaging as lockdowns as a sensible response to a virus – let alone universal lockdowns for a virus of entirely ignorable risk to most of the population.
Of course, there is no such thing as settled science. New evidence should change how we act. Robust new analysis showing lockdowns reliably cause more good than harm might have been compelling. Evidence of this sort would need years to emerge, and calculating the costs and benefits of lockdowns is nearly impossible to do accurately.
Even with such an analysis, we’d have to consider the unquantifiable cost of allowing a government to force us to be locked away without due process. It is not a simple as “if government can save X net lives by doing Y, it should do Y”. But that is for another time.
Latest data
How did lockdowns go? As badly as many of us predicted.
Here is a chart I produced in Excel using OECD data. This measures excess weekly deaths by % change from the average week, starting at the beginning of 2020. You can check my work by downloading the figures here: https://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?queryid=104676#
Measured against neighbours, Sweden’s excess death numbers over the three years from the start of 2020 are entirely unremarkable. The only standout is a spike in the light blue line between approximately weeks 9 and 17. Many will have relied on this to justify demands that Sweden throw out existing pandemic response policies and leverage the state monopoly on violence to deny children education, shut businesses, and confine people in their homes against their will. That short spell aside, Sweden’s line spends lots of time below that of its peers.
This chart substantiates a frequent refrain of mine: You can have Covid and lockdowns, or you can just have Covid. Many countries chose to have both.
The Spectator has used OECD and Eurostat data to produce a chart comparing Swedish excess deaths to all other OECD countries, highlighting Australia and the United Kingdom. Sweden did very well without lockdowns.
“But Sweden did lock down”
Some now argue Sweden did lock down. There seem to be two versions of this argument. One is that Swedes “locked themselves down”. That is simply an admission that the Swedish government did not lock people down.
There is evidence that Swedes limited their mobility in the absence of being legally forced to. However, this evidence also shows that hard lockdown measures caused greater, more immediate reductions in mobility.
Appropriately limiting our mobility is something we all do frequently. Avoiding visiting an ailing granny while feeling sick, for example. Have you ever wanted your national police force ensuring you do this?
The other variety of this argument is to highlight that the Swedish government had some hard lockdown measures. Again, this serves only to bolster the case against lockdowns.
Sweden had very few, very brief hard lockdown-style measures. As the Cato Institute explains, “public gathering and events were limited to no more than 50 participants in March 2020. This included theatre, cinema, concerts, lectures, religious meetings, demonstrations, sporting events, and amusement parks, but not workplaces, shopping centres, and private gatherings. In November 2020 this limit was reduced to eight people, then gradually lifted starting in May 2021 until it was fully removed in September 2021.
“In April 2020 the government banned private visits to elderly care homes. Bars and restaurants were ordered to offer table service only and the space between tables had to be increased. In November 2020, alcohol sales after 10 p.m. were banned, and by the end of the year, the deadline was advanced to 8 p.m. This rule was terminated in June 2021.”
As I said, very limited and very brief. Sweden outperformed many countries that had harder, more enduring lockdown measures. But Sweden hardly did enough restrictions to qualify as a lockdown.
As per Moonstone, “Swedes were encouraged to work from home if possible and limit travel within the country. In addition, people aged 70 or older were asked to limit social contact, and people with Covid symptoms were asked to self-isolate. The goal was to protect the elderly and other high-risk groups while slowing down the spread of the virus, so the healthcare system wouldn’t become overwhelmed.”
The fact that Sweden’s response was less bad than that of other nations does not suggest it was perfect. Limiting the size of gatherings and banning people from visiting their elderly relatives is draconian and unhelpful. Even the recommendations were essentially unjustified. Swedish authorities deserve some acclaim for resisting powerful global pressure to follow the world into Hell. That doesn’t mean they didn’t implement authoritarian and ineffective responses.
“But Sweden is unique”
Adjacent to the above defence is the one that says, “Sweden didn’t have a lockdown, but they are so different”. The assumption is that Swedish culture is so thoroughly divergent from all others that every other nation needed lockdowns, but Sweden didn’t.
Some cultures surely do tend to be less tactile in public than many other cultures. Swedes may on average be among those (like me) who prefer more personal space on a train or in a restaurant. I don’t know. But I’ve seen no evidence suggesting this is enough to significantly limit spread of an airborne virus to the extent that it is decisive on the necessity of lockdowns.
Keep in mind that social distancing rules were guess work – be it 1.5 metres or 6 feet, the advised distances were devoid of scientific backing.
The “but Sweden is different” defence strikes me as relying on an exaggerated cultural trope and a lack of data.
Faces fit for egg
Who does this expose? We all have acquaintances who slandered Sweden. “The Swedes are letting Covid rip,” some said. “Sweden is basically sacrificing its elderly,” cried others. But there were people in powerful places who claimed to be “following the science”, while in fact spouting often nasty rhetoric devoid of any scientific backing.
In “Misinformation and de-contextualization: international media reporting on Sweden and COVID-19,” published in Global Health in 2020, we have a catalogue of shame. It reminds us that The Guardian reported that “Swedish PM warned over ‘Russian roulette-style’ COVID-19 strategy”.
Even Time, the venerable news magazine, ran stories about Sweden’s “coronavirus disaster”.
The so-called Gray Lady, aka The New York Times, called Sweden the “the world’s cautionary tale” in July 2020. Author Peter S. Goodman told us that Sweden’s “decision to carry on in the face of the pandemic has yielded a surge of deaths without sparing its economy from damage — a red flag as the United States and Britain move to lift lockdowns.” He described their approach as an “unorthodox, open-air experiment”.
Some publications parroted unsubstantiated claims with slanderous tones. Consider this line from the Los Angeles Times in March 2022, citing a report in Nature:
“The Swedish government, they report, deliberately tried to use children to spread COVID-19 and denied care to seniors and those suffering from other conditions.”
No solutions, only trade-offs
What were the costs? There is no sensible way to calculate them. When you shut down everything, you make almost everything worse. How might we try to quantify the emotional damage? Where would you begin to quantify the impact of infrastructure maintenance forgone? Would you like to guess at the horror caused by a generation of toddlers starved of interaction with peers for sustained periods? And how many did abruptly-changed hospital protocols kill?
As the fantastic Thomas Sowell puts it, “there are not solutions, only trade-offs”. Lockdowners pretended they had a “solution” – costs be damned!
Every cost caused by lockdowns will also echo an eternity. Consider the loss of economic output. Plenty of economic productivity doesn’t just happen once and then evaporate. It compounds. If your share portfolio gains 5% this year, and you leave that additional portion invested, that additional 5% grows on itself. It is used productively. In a few years’ time it may be 12%. But not if you obliterate it.
Productivity prevented from happening during lockdowns is still robbing us. And it will keep doing so into the future.
What now?
Without government intervention, society would have dealt with this period just fine. Good information would have emerged – alongside some bad. Good responses would have emerged – alongside some bad. Free markets would have found solutions. They always do.
We need acknowledgement of reality. The ongoing denial will get us nowhere. Politicians, scientists, and journalists who flagrantly denounced Sweden must be held to account. They owe the Kingdom an apology. We all deserve honesty.
A small number of mainstream publications have cautiously acknowledged that Sweden was right all along. A Boston Globe sub-header from September 2023 read, “Scandinavia’s largest country avoided lockdowns and mask mandates. The result: fewer excess deaths and much less social damage.”
Washington Monthly said in April 2022 “The U.S. botched the pandemic – overprotecting kids at low risk of serious illness and under-protecting older Americans. Stockholm pursued a light touch and fared far better.”
Will we get this sort of acknowledgement and apology at scale? I doubt it. Imagine admitting to this. Many people who claim to adhere to foundational principles like innocence until proven guilty would have to concede they supported de facto house arrest for billions without so much as a hearing. Smart, educated people will have to concede they either totally misread scientific evidence or didn’t bother to try. Good parents would need to concede they denied their children education on a whim. Plenty of people even jettisoned the sacrosanct rule of informed consent in medicine.
Reconciliation aside, we have a job to do. The media, supranational organisations and our anointed billionaire “nice guys” are already preparing to “save us” when the next flu-like virus hits. We can never let lockdowns happen again.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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