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In Battling the Coronavirus Pandemic There Are Winning and Losing National Strategies

June 12, 2020

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June 12, 2020 – Finland, today, announced that it was easing cross-border travel with six countries. The country has reported over 7,000 cases of COVID-19 with 6,200 in full recovery while 325 have died from the virus. There are currently 548 active cases of which 3 are considered critical. Finland was one of the Scandinavian countries that went into full lockdown early in the pandemic.

With a population of 5.5 million, the country didn’t do a lot of testing, just over 214 thousand, but it got other things right and now is lifting restrictions on flights and ferry services to and from Denmark, Estonia, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Norway. Note, Sweden is not among the countries in this new Finnish bubble which will come into effect on Monday, June 15th. Anyone arriving from any other country other than the six aforementioned will be restricted to self-quarantine fo 14 days. But those coming from the six will be free to move about the country.

Excluding Sweden from the group of Baltic and Scandinavian countries says a lot. At the early stages of the pandemic Finland and its Scandinavian and Baltic neighbours shut down their schools, libraries, restaurants and many other businesses. The closures led to temporary unemployment with the governments providing wage subsidies for those laid off.

Finns stayed home and practiced social distancing. The same happened in the other six countries. But Sweden, in contrast, gambled by allowing schools and public services to remain open, as well as businesses. Swedes were asked to voluntarily practice social distancing but the stores stayed open as if it were business as usual. The Swedish idea was to keep the economy going while building herd immunity from mass exposure to the virus.

As of the time of writing of this posting Sweden is reporting nearly 50,000 cases of COVID-19 with more than 4,850 succumbing to the virus. Like Finland, Sweden has done very little testing, a mere 325,000 for its population of nearly 10.1 million. The gamble of this strategy was to keep Swedes employed and the economy going. But that’s not what happened. The Swedish economy tanked just like its Baltic and Scandinavian neighbours.

Sweden’s gross domestic product (GDP) forecast for 2020 is currently down by 5% and projected to decline by 7%. Finland’s GDP for 2020 is currently down by 6% where it is expected to remain. If the Swedish experiment were to be successful then its GDP decline had to be less than that of Finland, and cost fewer deaths. But Sweden has lost almost 15 times the number of lives to COVID-19 with deaths per million exceeding even the United States by almost 37%. I mention the U.S. because most would agree that its effort to stymie the virus has been seriously bungled to-date.

The Swedish policy of no hard lockdowns, and elementary and high schools, restaurants, and bars remaining open, as advocated by the country’s top epidemiologist, Anders Tegnell, therefore, has proven catastrophic. Tegnell, in hindsight, has acknowledged the policy failure. He had hoped that the majority of Sweden’s population would have been exposed to the virus at the onset which would have led to herd immunity. The target number was 60% of the more than 10 million, considered a minimal herd-immunity threshold. But by the end of April, when the government did blood testing of Stockholm residents it showed antibodies present in only 7.3% of the city’s population, almost nine times lower than the herd-immunity target. That explains why Sweden’s COVID-19 numbers have continued to climb while its neighbours have experienced declining numbers of new cases and higher rates of recovery.

As for the neighbours, all part of the new Finnish bubble, they have individually and collectively outperformed Sweden when it comes to the number of cases and deaths as you can see below.