Cato Event Podcast

The virus that causes COVID-19 has now become endemic after it first emerged two and a half years ago. In the pandemic’s early days, many countries’ public health officials curtailed economic and social activity to various degrees, prescribed social distancing, enforced lockdowns, required masking, and pushed for other nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce illness and death. Those NPIs imposed an enormous economic and social cost by greatly reducing individual liberty in exchange for promised health benefits. Elsewhere, most famously in Sweden, public health officials were fiercely criticized for implementing less‐​harsh “light touch” NPI measures. Sweden’s approach presents a fascinating quasi‐​natural experiment to evaluate the merits and demerits of the more liberal approach to managing the COVID-19 pandemic and to evaluate whether the loss in personal and economic freedom was partly compensated by a decrease in illness and death. Sweden’s outcomes on viral spread, excess mortalit