Covid-19 UK vs Sweden vs other Scandinavian and W. European countries and lockdowns

Introduction

An article published March 25, 2021 “UK Lockdown One Year On: It Doesn't Work, It Never Worked, & It Wasn't Supposed To Work” – by Kit Knightly at

https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/uk-lockdown-one-year-it-doesnt-work-it-never-worked-it-wasnt-supposed-work

shows the following chart

as evidence that lockdowns do not work. It then goes on to advocate for no lockdowns, no social distancing, no masks etc. and blames such restrictions as being useless and propagated by governments for ulterior motives.

According to the Wall Street Journal Jan 8 edition "Sweden had until recently followed a largely voluntary approach to virus precautions such as social distancing. It also avoided widespread school closures and mask mandates. However, with more than 9,200 deaths related to covid-19, Sweden has the highest per capita death rate of Scandinavian countries and is now struggling to handle a surge in cases at overstretched hospitals. In January 2021, Sweden passed a law allowing COVID-19 lockdowns."

There are of course differences between the UK and Sweden including the sizes of the population, the climates, the strains of the virus prevalent in the country (Sweden reported 11% of its cases being the UK variant in early February) and the social environments (e.g. health systems, habits, governance etc.) we thus also compare Sweden with other bordering Scandinavian countries (Denmark, Norway, Finland) with similar environments. 

We use the Johns Hopkins University (JHU) COVID-19 data at https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19.

Per Capita

If we compare the populations of Nordic countries adjacent to Sweden  with the UK there is a huge difference:

Thus we need to normalize the cases and deaths by the per capita. We thus report the cases or deaths per million population. A comparison between the Scandinavian countries by per capita cases and deaths is shown below:

Sweden stands out as leading in both cases and deaths per million population. In fact, Sweden has had over three times the number deaths per capita than the follower up Denmark and over 8 times that for neighboring Finland and Norway.  

Next let's look at the UK vs Sweden

This time the charts for Sweden and the UK are very similar with the UK leading in cumulative deaths per million population, while Sweden leads in the cumulative cases per million population. The recent surge in Sweden's deaths is interesting, whether it has anything to do with the introduction of the UK virus (see for example  https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-sweden-cases/sweden-reports-increased-spread-of-british-covid-19-variant-idUSKBN2A21QB, Feb 2, 2021 reporting 11% of Swedish cases being the UK COVID-19 variant), or Swedish views on masks, lockdowns, social distancing, school openings etc., I do not hazard a guess.

Looking at the most recent data on daily confirmed cases and deaths for West European countries we can see the rise in cases:

Sweden is leading the way in daily confirmed cases, followed by France, Italy and Austria. Italy leads in daily deaths followed by France, Spain, Austria.