Covid has taken far more lives in Sweden. There are explanations for this. The country failed to protect its elderly in care homes early in the epidemic. But these numbers make it very hard to say that the Swedes have done something particularly clever.
What can we say about the economic impact? Governments don’t need to decree lockdowns to have a dampening effect on economic activity. The most immediate impact of the lockdowns earlier this year was on employment. So, here are the unemployment rates for the three countries:
Evidently Sweden entered the lockdown with a worse problem than its neighbors. But it is very hard to say that the country gained any great economic advantage for its workforce by eschewing lockdowns. The spike in Swedish unemployment looks identical to the spike suffered by its neighbors.
In the (unlikely) event that a vaccine were made available to the entire Scandinavian population tomorrow, it seems to me that the Swedish approach would have been proven wrong in hindsight — more deaths, more people dealing with the after-effects of Covid-19, and no great economic benefit. If we wait another year for the vaccine, it remains perfectly possible that the Swedish approach will look much better, as other countries resort to fresh lockdowns.
For a subtler examination, Adam Patinkin of David Capital Partners LLC in Chicago, whose work I featured last month, points to a number of problems with comparisons between Sweden and other countries. He mentions that Sweden had an abnormally lenient flu season last year; that it has a liberal definition of Covid deaths; and perhaps most importantly that Sweden’s “all-cause” mortality is lower than usual this year, while neighboring Finland’s is higher. It is possible that other countries have sped deaths for other reasons by locking down.
Even in the U.S., there remains a case that herd immunity is growing close. Former hedge fund manager Whitney Tilson publishes regular updates on the course of Covid-19, citing numerous sources. His latest is optimistic. A third wave is under way in the U.S. but crucially it is happening in parts of the country that didn’t suffer a wave of infections before, such as the prairie states and the Upper Midwest. There is no such severe outbreak in places that have already had one, such as New York City. This suggests that they have reached a “break-point” where the disease finds it much harder to spread. In non-medical language, this makes the case for optimism that the end is near as well as I have ever seen it made.
It’s fair to say there is still no proof that this optimism is justified, or that Sweden’s approach has worked better than others. It’s still too soon to tell. But the case for optimism is stronger than it appears from current headlines.
A Rejoinder And A Simplification
Finally, there was one recurrent criticism of me to which I want to reply. People don’t think it should be necessary to look to academic philosophers in universities to make up our minds. We should make up our minds ourselves.
To this I would reply that the basics of moral philosophy shouldn’t stay in universities but should be shared far and wide, which is what I’m trying to do. To some extent the complaint people are making comes from Marx: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” Academic philosophers have come up with different ways to help us make difficult moral and political choices. Covid has provided us with a classic example of where some clear notions of how to make moral choices would have helped us all.