by George J. Dance
Good morning, Toronto and the world. Welcome to Monday, November 23, 2020: Another day and another week in the ongoing struggle between lockdowners and libertarians. On a grim note, I am locked down again as of today, as is the rest of my city. CBC News has the story:
November 23, 2020 - "Toronto and Peel Region have officially moved into 'lockdown' as Ontario tries to curb the province's steep rise in COVID-19 cases. The shutdown will last a minimum of 28 days and could result in fines as high as $750 for people caught breaking public-health rules. Confused about what those rules are? This guide will help."
Read more: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/open-closed-peel-toronto-lockdown-covid19-1.5812048
Things look grim all over today. For the past two months the coronavirus has resurged in the northern hemisphere, with case rates soaring in both Europe and North America. The media panic has surged right in step, followed in turn by a new wave of lockdowns. At least 13 European nations have been locked down again. Here in Canada, Manitoba and Nunavut are closed, while regional lockdowns have been imposed on parts of Quebec, British Columbia, and Ontario.
For a libertarian, it is hard to find any good news on this front. But there is good news out there, if one can only find it. Perhaps the best is that two Nordic countries, Finland and Norway, have rejected a second lockdown. The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) has that story:
November 18, 2020 - "While the U.S. and Europe struggle to contain an autumn surge in coronavirus infections, two small nations are bucking the trend, keeping cases under control without stringent restrictions. In the north of Europe, Finland and Norway boast the West’s lowest rates of mortality linked to Covid-19 and a low incidence of coronavirus infections even though they have kept their economies and societies largely open while lockdowns returned to the continent.
"While Sweden has captured global attention with its refusal to adopt mandatory restrictions – a policy now being reversed in the face of spiraling infections and deaths – its two northern neighbors now stand out as the closest Western equivalents to Asian nations that have managed to avoid the worst of the pandemic. Their recipe: a brief, targeted lockdown in March, followed by tight border controls with mandatory testing and quarantine for all travelers."
Read more: https://www.wsj.com/articles/finland-and-norway-avoid-covid-19-lockdowns-but-keep-the-virus-at-bay-11605704407
Denmark has had one regional lockdown this fall, thanks to a species jump by the virus to mink and back to humans, but there is no sign of a national lockdown there, either. There is a rumor that the Danish state had to withdraw a draconian Covid bill in the face of widespread public protests (more good news if true) but I have not been able to confirm any of that. Meanwhile, the other two Nordic nations – Iceland and Sweden – were never locked down at all. So it could be that the whole Nordic region has turned its back on the lockdown craze.
To be clear, Norway and Finland have not decided to "be like Sweden." Instead, it looks like their plan is to be like Iceland and keep the virus out by quarantining everyone who enters the country, at least until the deus ex machina of a safe and effective vaccine arrives. Sweden, which has resigned itself to the coronavirus becoming endemic, is still the outlier on that point. However, that makes no difference to libertarians, who can live with either strategy and either end. What is important to us is their rejection of forcibly disrupting their own societies as a means.
The Swiss government, too, has rejected a new national lockdown. Only the Financial Times, hidden behind its paywall, has carried that story that I can see, so I can give merely a headline and link:
"Switzerland holds out against following its neighbours into new lockdown". https://www.ft.com/content/7a29da5b-2110-4773-8320-6b344da37a6e
Meanwhile, in the lockdown-loving media there has been a full-court press on Sweden, the non-lockdown state with the most fatalities. (Notice the snark in even the WSJ 's reporting.) Cases, hospitalizations, and deaths have all increased sharply in Sweden this month: there may be 600 deaths there in November, as opposed to just 60 in October. Stories about the failure of "the Swedish experiment" are ubiquitous on the web. Surely that failure is proof positive that lockdowns, and only lockdowns, can prevent mass death? Surely the country will lock down any day now?
Surely not. For one thing, 600 deaths (while tragic) does not equate to mass death. For another, there is no reason to assume that a lockdown could have prevented any of those deaths. Whether lockdowns save lives is precisely the hypothesis in question in this experiment, in which Sweden (the only country to stick with traditional disease mitigation) is not the outlier but the control. The test is not how well Sweden does, but how well it is doing compared to the countries that locked down. And in some double-lockdown countries, the death toll has been far higher.
At the end of summer, Sweden had the fifth largest number of deaths with Covid per capita in Europe, behind only Belgium, Spain, Italy and the UK (not counting microstates with less than 100,000 people). Since then it has fallen from #5 to #10 in rank, being overtaken successively by France, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Czechia. All of #1 through #9 are in lockdown. All of them but North Macedonia have been locked down twice. And all of them are doing worse, per capita, than Sweden.
In fairness, that is not the end of the story. At least four double-lockdown nations – Austria, Germany, Ireland, and Poland – currently have less deaths per capita than Sweden. Deaths in those four countries are rising, though, just as they are rising in the Nordic nations and Switzerland. We need more data before judging the ability (essential to judging the need) of lockdowns to save lives.
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