Lund University Professors Frederik Andersson and Lars Jonung have written for Spiked discussing their new Economic Affairs article discussing the impact of Sweden’s relatively liberal approach to Covid-19.

They wrote:

“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.)

“The impact of lockdowns on mortality rates may have been inconsequential, but the economic effects were overwhelmingly negative. The more a country locked down, the larger the decline in GDP. The UK recorded a fall in GDP of almost 10 per cent – the largest decline in output in modern history. In Sweden, in contrast, the fall in economic output was actually less than that during the financial crisis of 2008. The Swedish economy had fully recovered by early 2021 and is now about six per cent larger than it was in 2019.”

Read the full piece here.

You can also read their article The Covid-19 lesson from Sweden: Don’t lock down in the Economic Affairs journal.