‘Judge me in a year’ said Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s State Epidemiologist, in July 2020, when his country was being attacked for sticking to its pandemic plan rather than adopting the novel intervention of lockdown. The latest World Health Organization figures add to the evidence that has been accumulating since summer 2021. Sweden managed the pandemic more successfully than most, with much less disruption of everyday life and economic activity…
…Our public inquiry must not be diverted into the minutiae of arguments about whether we should have locked down a week earlier or two weeks earlier. It must be free to examine the whole strategy and, in particular, why the robust social science evidence on the management of emergencies, and its contribution to pandemic planning since the early 2000s, was abandoned so precipitately.
A Social Science Space blog