webcache arī ne?

Jo pats raksts ir paywall, bet tāpēc es ieliku saiti uz google webcache, kas rāda teksta versiju. Ja tas arī nerāda, tad laikam ir reģionāli ierobežojumi. Iekopēšu tekstu tepat.

-------------

Lockdown supporters cannot bear the thought that Sweden has got it right
An honest appraisal of how the Scandinavian country has fared raises plenty of awkward questions for politicians in the rest of Europe

Ross Clark 9 August 2020 • 11:12am Ross Clark

Sweden has fulfilled the same role during the Covid-19 crisis as Argentina fulfils in every World Cup. It’s the team which everyone – apart from the natives themselves, naturally – wants to get beaten. This has been especially true in the liberal US press, which has taken time off from berating Donald Trump to publish lengthy pieces on the supposed failure of the Swedish approach. “The Swedish government didn’t enforce social distancing,” began the Washington Monthly, for example, in May when Sweden briefly had the world’s highest death rate from the disease. “It’s now paying the price – in lives and GDP.”

Even neighbouring Nordic countries – normally peas in a pod – have taken against Sweden. When Denmark and Norway re-opened their borders to the world they initially left out Sweden. Sweden’s chief epidemiologist, Anders Tegnell, who has acquired a rock star image among some of his countrymen, is seen as a maverick by many abroad.

It’s not hard to see why politicians, officials and many others around the world need Sweden to fail and to fail spectacularly. If the Scandinavian country is not seen to suffer for its failure to lock down its population and close down much of its economy then citizens in other countries are going to start asking awkward questions.

For a while it looked as if Sweden might well fail spectacularly. While other, locked-down countries saw their rates of new infection plummet and gradually unlocked, infections in Sweden remained stubbornly high. Economic projections suggested that Sweden was going to suffer a deep recession anyway. All those needless deaths, it seemed, and Swedes were still going to lose their jobs.

Then came July, and a reminder that lockdown is no long-term solution to a pandemic. Infection rates began to creep up in countries which had locked down – first Spain, then Germany, France, Belgium. Some have been going to into selective second lockdowns. All they had really done by incarcerating their populations for weeks is sweep the virus under the carpet for another day. Sweden, by contrast, has as yet seen no second wave.

Coronavirus Sweden Spotlight Chart - Cases default
Meanwhile, the Swedish economy has surprised on the upside. Last week, its economy was revealed to have shrunk by 8.6 per cent in the second quarter – cataclysmic by normal standards, of course, yet in the circumstances it counts as a triumph. GDP across the Eurozone shrank by 12 per cent, with Spain’s economy plunging by 18 per cent quarter on quarter. Britain’s GDP figures won’t be out until next Wednesday, but we will be doing very well if we don’t out-shrink Spain. At one point the Office of Budgetary Responsibility was penciling in a 35 per cent plunge for the UK in the second quarter.

There was no way that Sweden, with many of its neighbours’ economies closed, was going to escape without a sharp contraction. Volvo, for example, suffered a 38 per cent fall in sales as showrooms across Europe were closed. Nevertheless, there is an intriguing possibility that Sweden could be just about the only developed country to manage to get through the Covid-19 crisis without technically suffering a recession – defined as two consecutive quarters of negative growth.