Five years on: The countries that never locked down for Covid-19 {2025 study}

BBC ^ | 5th March 2025 | Chris Baraniuk

[Cronos]

Most of the world found itself confined to their homes in March 2020 as Covid-19 spread at a blistering pace. Some countries didn't impose any lockdown restrictions – so was their decision the right one?

Sweden, Taiwan, Uruguay, Iceland and a few others never enacted a lockdown that involved severe restrictions on the movement of people

Five years later, the scientific studies and data have piled up, offering a detailed, long-term assessment of whether these countries were right to reject this most drastic of public health interventions.

Scientists have tried to answer that question. Ingeborg Forthun at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health and researchers in other countries including Sweden published a study in May 2024 that compared excess deaths in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland during the first years of the pandemic. https://academic.oup.com/eurpub/article/34/4/737/7675929

While Sweden avoided strict government imposed controls, instead relying mainly on voluntary behavioural changes from is citizens, the other three nations imposed strict lockdowns in the early stages of the pandemic. Norway, Finland and Denmark closed schools and most other aspects of public life while also asking people to work from home, but they stopped short of confining people to their homes in the way other countries such as the UK did.

"The four countries have a comparable number of excess deaths when you account for the fact that population sizes differ," says Forthun. What lockdowns did affect, in part, was the timing of when spikes in excess deaths occurred. Of Norway's approach, Forthun adds: "We probably kept some older and vulnerable people alive for a longer period."

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TOPICS: Health/Medicine
KEYWORDS: covid; covid19; lockdowns; pandemic

[fso301]

A long article meant to cloud rather than clarify.

[Lovely-Day-For-A-Guinness]

For a long time I saw the numbers of deaths in Italy and the hard working nurses and I really believed that a 3 week quarantine in an affected area would work. then it expanded, and I still believed it would work. I don’t remember when exactly I stopped believing it would work, but I freely admit that I completely fell for the story in 2020

If you had monitored the Diamond Princess, the cruise ship that wasn't permitted to dock anywhere, you would have quickly realized that Covid was a scam.

That publicly visible and perfect petri dish showed clearly that Covid was not an existential threat.

I opted not to be pawn in their frantic game.

[Cronos]

I vaguely remember it, but wasn’t it like 20% of the ship got infected? and half of those infected showed no symptoms initially?

I can’t remember how many died out of the 3000 (or was it more) of the passengers

[Albion Wilde]

bump