Section 3 The evidence from countries with different policies: Sweden vs UK
In contrast to many other European countries, the Swedish strategy has been one of adopting much less restrictive measures that is far short of a lockdown (see Figure 4). In terms of the health impacts, there is mixed evidence over how different they are compared to those in countries that adopted lockdown policies. The study by Born et al (2020) (9) estimates how the infection might have spread if Sweden had imposed a lockdown like many other European countries. They find essentially no difference in the likely path of infections. Krueger, Uhlig and Xie (2020) (10) assess how economies might have evolved during the pandemic with few government restrictions. They conclude:
“One may view our results as the “Swedish” outcome: Sweden has largely avoided government restrictions on economic activity, allowing people to make their own choices. These private incentives and well-functioning labour-and social-insurance markets, we submit, may solve the COVID-19 spread on their own, mitigating the decline in economic activity.”
But the study by Conyon et al (2020), which compares deaths in Sweden with those in Norway and Denmark,  finds strong evidence that the looser restrictions in Sweden compared with its close neighbours led to significantly more people dying.
Despite this the UK data show a significantly higher cumulative death rate than Sweden (Figure 2); Financial Times estimates (11), as well as those shown in Figure 3 above, put excess deaths relative to population in the UK at more than twice the Swedish level by early June 2020. On this measure Figure 3 shows that Sweden sits near the middle of the pack for European countries. While cumulative death rates for Sweden remain markedly higher than in its immediate neighbours, they are not very different from European averages. Cases of new infections in Sweden in early June 2020 did, however, increase, unlike in most other European countries where they continued to decline even as lockdowns have begun to be eased.