How would you respond to the charge that lockdowns do not achieve anything? Taking the two examples of the United Kingdom and Sweden, one has been in lockdown since the 16th of March, the other has had no lockdown. Sweden's measures of combating the epidemic are mostly voluntary. It has banned gatherings of more than 50 people and has closed secondary schools and primary schools remain open (in Britain, primary schools and secondary schools are open to the children of key workers). Most other measures are in the form of government advice to citizens.
The official death statistics for Sweden and the United Kingdom, normalized for population, look like this:
I thought maybe the population density had something to do with it. Sweden has a population density less than one-tenth that in Britain. It has about twice the land area with less than one-sixth the population. But the urban population of Sweden is at 87%, whereas in the UK it is 83%. The population densities of their capital cities are not hugely different (14,700 per square mile in London, versus 13,000 per square mile in Stockholm).
I have heard it mentioned that Sweden is distinguishing between people dying
with Covid-19 and people dying
of Covid-19, thus getting a lower death rate than what it would be if they applied other countries' reporting methods, but I cannot substantiate this claim.
Life is not as normal in Sweden, but it is not in the same state of complete economic paralysis that we are.
I compare deaths only, because positive case numbers are more so an indicator of the activity of testers than they are an indicator of how many people in a country have the disease.