Section 3 The evidence from countries with different policies:
Sweden vs UK
In contrast to many other European countries, the Swedish strategy has
been one of adopting much less restrictive measures that is far short of
a lockdown (see Figure 4). In terms of the health impacts, there is mixed evidence over how different they are compared to those in countries that
adopted lockdown policies. The study by Born et al (2020) (9) estimates
how the infection might have spread if Sweden had imposed a lockdown
like many other European countries. They find essentially no difference
in the likely path of infections. Krueger, Uhlig and Xie (2020) (10)
assess how economies might have evolved during the pandemic with few
government restrictions. They conclude:
“One may view our results as the “Swedish” outcome: Sweden has
largely avoided government restrictions on economic activity, allowing
people to make their own choices. These private incentives and
well-functioning labour-and social-insurance markets, we submit, may
solve the COVID-19 spread on their own, mitigating the decline in
economic activity.”
But the study by Conyon et al (2020), which compares deaths in Sweden with those in Norway and Denmark, finds strong evidence that the looser restrictions in Sweden compared with its close neighbours led to significantly more people dying.
Despite this the UK data show a significantly higher cumulative death rate than
Sweden (Figure 2); Financial Times estimates (11), as well as
those shown in Figure 3 above, put excess deaths relative to population
in the UK at more than twice the Swedish level by early June 2020. On
this measure Figure 3 shows that Sweden sits near the middle of the pack
for European countries. While cumulative death rates for Sweden remain markedly
higher than in its immediate neighbours, they are not very different
from European averages. Cases of new infections in Sweden in early June
2020 did, however, increase, unlike in most other European countries
where they continued to decline even as lockdowns have begun to be
eased.