Meanwhile, back in the real world, the effects of government panic are ruining things for everybody except the Swedes, it seems.
More importantly, we need to ask what the long-term factors are. We haven’t even begun to see the impact of the lockdown. The economic costs of bankrupting millions of businesses and funding bailouts for others, while we have isolated our children and removed their opportunities to be educated and to build a future, will reverberate for decades. It was already being argued in March of last year (Miltimore, 2020), the cure could be worse than the disease. As we saw Sweden starting to return to normality and as the US and the UK are undergoing more lockdowns, and the destruction of a larger component of the economy, maybe we should rethink our strategy before the nanny state smothers the baby.