Coronavirus: Sweden’s lockdown delay ‘cost 2000 lives’, study reveals

As other countries closed shops, schools and restaurants, and ordered citizens to stay home, Swedes eschewed lockdowns.

People enjoy warm and spring-like weather with high temperatures free of lockdown in Stockholm in April, 2020. Picture: Anders Wiklund/AFP

Sweden could have prevented nearly 40 per cent of the coronavirus deaths in its first wave had it imposed a timely lockdown, a study suggests.

While neighbouring governments closed shops, bars, schools and restaurants, and in some cases ordered citizens to stay in their homes, Sweden mainly relied in the early stages of the pandemic on recommendations and a ban on gatherings of more than 50 people.

Over the first six months nearly 6000 Swedes died of COVID-19, one of the highest per capita death rates in Europe at that time and substantially worse than other Nordic states.

Three economists in Germany have now estimated that at least 2,000 of those lives might have been saved with a prompt lockdown.

Sweden’s state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell. Picture: Henrik Montgomery/AFP

The group, led by Benjamin Born at the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management, modelled the effects of a lockdown in Sweden by looking at how the infection rates had changed in other western European countries with similar early outbreaks, demographics and population distributions. The main countries they used were Norway, Denmark, Finland and the Netherlands.

They created a statistical approximation of how the first wave might have played out in Sweden had it gone into a nine-week lockdown on March 15. They calculated that roughly 75 per cent of Sweden’s infections and 38 per cent of its deaths would have been prevented with relatively minor economic consequences, the study, published in the science journal PLOS One, found.

“A lockdown during the first wave would have lowered infections and deaths substantially,” Gernot Muller, professor of international macroeconomics at Tubingen University and one of the paper’s authors, said. “But because lockdowns also come with social costs which we do not analyse, we are not taking a stand as to whether Sweden should have imposed a lockdown.”

The team’s method, known as a synthetic control unit, is widely used in economics but has its drawbacks, most notably that the researchers could not fully capture all of the hundreds of different factors that might have affected the course of the pandemic.

Sweden has faced three waves of outbreaks, the latest in December and March, but cases are now falling and on Sunday it recorded no COVID-19 related deaths in a day for the first time since last September. It has recorded just over 1 million cases and 14,100 deaths from a population of 10.2 million.

The Times