For those who’ve forgotten, Sweden was excoriated by corporate media and politicians for its lighter-touch Covid-19 strategy. Here’s a sample of headlines:• “Why the Swedish Model for Fighting COVID-19 Is a Disaster” (Time, October 2020).• “The Inside Story of How Sweden Botched Its Coronavirus Response” (Foreign Policy, December 2020).• “Sweden Stayed Open and More People Died of Covid-19, but the Real Reason May Be Something Darker” (Forbes, 2020).• “Sweden Has Become the World’s Cautionary Tale” (New York Times, July 2020).• “I Just Came Home to Sweden. I’m Horrified by the Coronavirus Response Here” (Slate, April 2020).
Unintended (presumably) consequence seem to rear their ugly head time and time again. It should be predictable at this point. It isn't that COVID wasn't a potentially dangerous disease with the capacity to kill people, it's that in many cases, the efforts of government to mitigate that risk were even more catastrophic than the disease itself.
This lesson comes across pretty clearly in the results that Sweden achieved. They were by far the least restrictive nation in Europe when it came to COVID measures. Despite this, or more accurately because of this, Sweden had fewer deaths per-capita than any other country in Europe.
This article contains a quote from Henry Hazlitt's "Economics in One Lesson" that I think is worth repeating here: "[There is] a persistent tendency of men to see only the immediate effects of a given policy and to neglect to inquire what the long-run effects of that policy will be."
Whenever massive policy changes are implemented (or sometimes even small ones) without due consideration of what the unintended effects might be, you can be sure it will be a disaster. The experiment we were all subjected to during COVID lockdowns demonstrates that quite well.