The Results of Europe’s Lockdown Experiment Are In
 

Excellent article in Bloomberg

With governments across Europe reopening their economies for business, it’s a good moment to look back on the different paths taken to control Covid-19 outbreaks to try to see how effective they were.

Some — above all Italy and Spain — enforced prolonged and strict lockdowns after infections took off. Others — especially Sweden — preferred a much more relaxed approach. Portugal and Greece chose to close down while cases were relatively low. France and the U.K. took longer before deciding to impose the most restrictive measures.

But, as our next chart shows, there’s little correlation between the severity of a nation’s restrictions and whether it managed to curb excess fatalities — a measure that looks at the overall number of deaths compared with normal trends.

Bloomberg - Are you a robot?