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The original lockdown strategy was sold to us as “flattening the curve,” which was supposed to take two weeks or so.
After a month or more, it became evident that politicians were so risk averse they had decided to “eliminate” the virus, even though this had never been done with any virus before in history.
Once embarked on this strategy, they either had to admit failure or find a way of deflecting attention to something else, which is where vaccines came in. But we now know that the vaccines could not eliminate the virus, and as my opening paragraphs show, weren’t even designed to stop transmission.
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After locking Australia down off and on for a year and spending somewhere around $800 billion, it is now obvious that the original focused protection strategy was the right one. Masks, lockdowns, mass vaccination, vaccine mandates, contact tracing and check-in apps achieved little but terrorise the community and weaken the economy.
There were some natural experiments where jurisdictions stuck with focused protection—Sweden was one.
In the United States, we have a good comparison between Florida, where after initial lockdowns, Governor Ron De Santis took a liberal approach, and California, where Governor Gavin Newsome took an authoritarian one.
Excess deaths are the best measure of the cost as they take into account not just COVID deaths but all deaths, whether caused by COVID or the COVID measures.
On this metric, Sweden comes out fairly close to its neighbours, as the graph below comparing it with Denmark illustrates.
Excess deaths: Sweden vs. Denmark. (Our World In Data)
How do we stop this from repeating itself, particularly as those responsible for this debacle seem to be keen to see the next pandemic arrive and are suggesting the same solutions?
The first thing should be to make the decision-making teams more diverse in terms of their expertise.
Graham Young is chief editor and the publisher of On Line Opinion. He is executive director of the Australian Institute for Progress, an Australian think tank based in Brisbane, and the publisher of On Line Opinion.
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