After a year of pandemic, is lockdown the only solution? (by Indira Fabbro)
After a year from the beginning of the Covid emergency, there are still questions around the world on the optimal ways to manage the epidemic. The analysis of these data serves precisely to understand how the geopolitical and economic balances at a global level will change in the coming years: those who have been able to better manage the pandemic will have the capacity and resources to make investments both in the economic, social and health sectors. Precisely for this reason, we can now allow ourselves to make comparisons, to look at and analyze what other countries have done in the face of this world emergency.
On the one hand there are the countries of Eastern and Northern Europe and, above all, the democracies of the Far East that have avoided the use of generalized lockdowns, focusing on limited confinements and, in general, on the protection of the most at risk.
On the other hand, there are countries, especially from the Latin and Anglo-Saxon world, which have used generalized lockdowns on the entire population as their main weapon.
The countries that have adopted the most restrictive measures between lockdowns and outdoor masks (Italy, Argentina, UK and France) are those in which the greatest number of deaths have occurred and which have also paid and will pay the highest price in terms of economic recession.
Several studies agree precisely on this point: the countries that have imposed generalized lockdowns are those where there is the greatest mortality from Covid in relation to the population and perhaps for this reason many nations have avoided the use of lockdown from the beginning (eg . Sweden). But how can a generalized lockdown cause more deaths in a pandemic than less restrictive measures?
The explanation is the one provided several times by Anders Tegnell in Sweden and by epidemiologists in Taiwan, Japan and South Korea and the reason is quite simple (a basic notion for those who study epidemiology): if a virus is lethal only on a part of the population (in this case on very old people suffering from previous diseases) then the more the virus circulates among people not at risk, the more a group immunity is created that can protect the people most at risk!
If, on the other hand, the circulation of the virus is indiscriminately slowed down, the likelihood that among those infected there are those most at risk of losing their lives increases.
And how does the famous “Italian model” of pandemic management fit into all this? From the analysis of various data it seems to be the absolute worst in Europe, first in the world for deaths in relation to the number of inhabitants and second only to Argentina as damage to the economy while among the most industrialized countries Russia, Japan and South Korea they are in much better condition on both counts. (Sources IMF – WHO, Oxford Economics elaboration).
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The article After a year of pandemic, is the lockdown the only solution? (by Indira Fabbro) comes from ScenariEconomici.it .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/dopo-un-anno-di-pandemia-il-lockdown-e-lunica-soluzione-di-indira-fabbro/ on Sat, 27 Mar 2021 07:00:17 +0000.