Live free and die: Sweden's coronavirus experience

We now know much more about Covid-19 than we did even a month ago. Serology tests have shown that only fairly small numbers of people in Europe and the US have had Covid-19, and the number of deaths combined with those antibody test results are consistent with an infection fatality rate in the order of 0.49-1.01%.

Sweden did not impose as strict a lockdown as most developed countries, but it still avoided the sort of death rates that many had feared. However, while Sweden may suggest that the benefits of lockdown have been overstated, it also shows that the costs have too.

Sweden has fallen between two stools: because of voluntary social distancing, it has not achieved herd immunity, or anything like it, but it also has not suppressed the virus as countries that have had a lockdown have. Ultimately, Sweden shows that some of the worst fears about uncontrolled spread may have been overblown, because people will act themselves to stop it. But, equally, it shows that criticisms of lockdowns tend to ignore that the real counterfactual would not be business as usual, but a slow, brutal, and uncontrolled spread of the disease throughout the population.