Relaxation of Restrictions, Part III - **Read OP for Mod Warnings**

GUARDIAN
As Europe emerges from lockdown, the question hangs: was Sweden right?
Simon Jenkins

Stockholm gambled in its response to coronavirus, but neither its economy nor its healthcare system have collapsed


Who on earth is right? We cannot all be right.

One country has all but dropped off the Covid-19 radar: Sweden. Just two months ago, it held hands with Britain in rejecting total lockdown and trusting “social distancing”. Then on 23 March, Boris Johnson did a U-turn, leaving Sweden and, to a lesser extent, Germany, on its own. Since then the divergence has become radical and political. Sweden’s centre-left government, darling of Bernie Sanders and world liberalism, is suddenly lauded by the libertarian right.

Like millions, I have become an armchair epidemiologist. The reason is instinctive. I am being ordered daily by my prime minister to live in fear of my life. I have come to exist in a miasma of R-rates, antigen tests, infection fatality ratios and “excess deaths”. Now, as Europe and the world emerge blearily to survey the wreckage of lockdown, the question is still left hanging. Was Sweden right?

The one table that glares at us daily is the international league table of deaths per million. Even if the aggregates are unreliable, there is a crude reality to a body count. Yet the only conclusion to be drawn from the figures is that the league table is no help to policy.

There is no correlation between fatalities and lockdown stringency. The most stringent lockdowns – as in China, Italy, Spain, New Zealand and Britain – have yielded both high and low deaths per million. Hi-tech has apparently “worked” in South Korea, but so has no-tech in Sweden. Sweden’s 319 deaths per million is far ahead of locked-down Norway’s 40 and Denmark’s 91, but it’s well behind locked-down UK’s 465 and Spain’s 569.

Sweden’s light-touch policy is led by two scientists, Johan Giesecke and his protégé Anders Tegnell. The latter currently leads Stockholm’s strategy with daily matter-of-fact media appearances and 73% popular support. Unlike in politicised Britain, ministers do not regularly appear.

Tegnell has been emphatic throughout. A degree of social distancing and avoiding crowds is enough. As for lockdown, “Nothing to do with [it] has a scientific basis.”

To Giesecke, a mild-mannered veteran World Health Organization virologist, Covid-19 is “a tsunami sweeping the world”, but he notes that it threatens older, sick people above all. He admits that Sweden’s higher-than-average death rate shows it made mistakes. “At first we failed to shield the old and vulnerable.” Its economy has suffered from a collapse in exports, but it has kept itself open and at work, and has not seen the surge in “all-causes excess deaths” of the UK and other high-lockdown states. This surge seems to be increasing due to a partial collapse in other areas of critical health care.

Where I find Sweden’s policy more of a gamble is in its faith in developing a “collective immunity” that will protect it from future outbreaks. Giesecke talks of half of all Swedes probably infected in some degree, and tests suggest that a quarter of people in Stockholm have the virus and will probably – but by no means certainly – be protected against any resurgence. This compares with just 2% of people in Oslo. That divergence in vulnerability can only be tested in the event of a second spike.

More to the point, there is no evidence of mass immunity having developed anywhere else. In Germany another lockdown sceptic, the virologist Hendrik Streek, thinks countries could be approaching one third immunity, which could be hopeful. But as policy, the idea is unnerving to many. Such was the fear generated by “herd immunity” in Britain in March that the phrase itself has become barely mentionable.

Yet according to Tegnell, whatever we think, “there is no other escape” but to find ways of living with this virus. There is no sign of a vaccine on the immediate horizon. We cannot ruin the world economy indefinitely. Better to concentrate on protecting our health services against it, should it return.

The half-Swedish commentator Freddie Sayer has been closely monitoring this debate from the UK. He makes the point that with each passing week the rest of Europe moves steadily closer to imitating Sweden. It is doing so because modern economies – and their peoples – just cannot live with such crushing abnormality as they have seen these past two months.

Britain now faces a challenge. I believe early criticism of Boris Johnson was unfair. He had a respectable case for proceeding on an evidence-based approach, had he only concentrated his attention on the high-risk health and care sectors. In his U-turn he opted for the politics of fear. He now has workers terrified of working, and parents terrified of school. He has frightened his economy into inertia.

I share the view of scientists such as Cambridge’s David Spiegelhalter and Oxford’s Carl Heneghan that this virus is unprecedented in its infectiousness, but that it will pass. The chief variant will prove to be how governments reacted, and the toll they took on the rest of their healthcare and the wider economy.

Sweden gambled in its response, but so did the rest of the world. South Africa’s lockdown threatens it with economic and political catastrophe. The UN warns that the world could lose four years of growth at a cost of $8.5 trillion. Famine and further disease will be rife. That was surely the greater gamble.