by Will Jones, Daily Sceptic:
Two Swedish researchers, Fredrik N.G. Andersson, an Associate Professor at the Department of Economics at Lund University, and Lars Jonung, a Professor Emeritus at the same university, have shown once again that Sweden proves the world wrong about lockdown. In Spiked, they write about their new research, published in the journal Economic Affairs.
In 2020, countries across the world followed in the footsteps of China and locked down hard against COVID-19. Liberties were drastically curtailed. As was economic activity, forcing governments to borrow tens if not hundreds of billions of pounds each to keep businesses and furloughed workers afloat.
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In Europe, one notable exception to this was Sweden. The Swedish Government, despite facing heavy criticism, decided against imposing tight restrictions on social activity. The evidence now overwhelmingly suggests that Sweden made the right choice.
Did lockdown restrictions do more harm than good? Did they even work at all? We tried to answer these questions in a recent paper for the journal, Economic Affairs. We looked at how different OECD countries in Europe, including the U.K., fared during the pandemic – both in terms of the economy and excess deaths. We took a particular interest in Sweden.
Although we could not explore every possible impact of the various lockdown measures, our conclusions were straightforward: countries that imposed more lockdown measures did not experience lower excess death rates. In fact, Sweden had one of the lowest excess death rates towards the end of the pandemic, with fewer people dying compared with a normal pre-pandemic year.
It is true that Sweden fared less well during the spring of 2020. However, these problems were temporary and limited to certain regions. This was mainly due to Swedes returning from winter vacations in the Alps, where the virus was spreading rapidly. In most parts of Sweden, the spread was modest and fully in line with that observed in other Nordic countries.
In fact, in our research, we could not find any correlation between lockdowns and excess deaths. Our results do not imply that every single lockdown measure was ineffective. Since all countries in Europe imposed a large number of social-distancing restrictions, including Sweden, we can only conclude that imposing full lockdown measures and ordering people to stay at home had little additional impact, if any. (In fact, our paper found a positive correlation between harsher lockdowns and excess deaths, though this was not statistically significant.)
On the other hand, say the researchers, the economic effects of lockdown were “overwhelmingly negative. The more a country locked down, the larger the decline in GDP”.
