In the Asian Flu of 1957-58, they rejected lockdowns (2021)

My bet here is that lockdowns, while originally intended to "flatten the curve" (and that was a good idea), turned out unexpectedly effective and appeared to reduce infection rates so quickly, especially in the beginning when people were very afraid and lockdown rules were strictly adhered to, that someone got an idea of just resolving the problem altogether by doing "lockdown to elimination", until it became evident that you can't lock down every country in the world unless you threaten/use nukes, and shutting down travel indefinitely is also not possible, and the whole thing became a charade.

Lesson learned for the liberals is to listen to those on the right at least from time to time. If they sometimes behave like idiots it doesn't mean they really are. Republicans got it right on the Covid question.

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Certainly not! The fundamental problem is that arguments written from a naive perspective of assuming/asserting we have these things, while we most definitely do not, end up advocating for horribly oppressive policies.

The current government policy is that most everyone should be continually working around 40 hours a week, enforced by a financial treadmill created by continual monetary stimulus. So this noble idea that people could have individually chosen to self isolate or freely associate is fallacious with our current setup. Without "lockdowns" (aka closing businesses), most people would have been forced to keep going into work for business as usual, just as they do for other communicable diseases until the symptoms cannot be ignored.

Centralized control begets more centralized control to address its own failings. Focusing on surface issues while ignoring their underlying causes just makes you end up being a tool for entrenched interests wanting authoritarian policies that benefit them.

That's a theory for countries without a Bill of Rights to practice.

> Did Sweden end up worse off with no lockdown?

I'm wondering how a reading of that article could lead anyone to quote it as an example of 'no lockdowns' - its very explicit that in many ways the measures taken in Sweden were even more restrictive (after 2020) than its neighbors in Norway and Denmark - both of which fared better than Sweden, both in deaths-per-million and also in the effect that the pandemic had on the economy.

The truth is that while the initial (and quite brief) open policies were in place, the authorities mistakenly thought that herd-immunity was close to being achieved, and that the astronomically high number of deaths (at several stages, the highest number of deaths-per-million in the world), were worth the reward of achieving it. The government even had one workshop where they discussed with relevant authorities how they would handle the negative press from other countries when Sweden could announce they were 'over' the pandemic (this was naturally before the catastrophic fall and winter of 2020).

After the deadly winter, the government more firmly took the reins from the health authority, and people outside Sweden would be surprised to hear how many restrictions were actually in place: including bans on group meetings, caps on the number of people who could enter a store at the same time, high school kids studying from home, and so on.

But most of all, Sweden is a country where people have lived with 'social distancing' for centuries: Stockholm has the highest number of single-person households of any capital city in the world, and that pattern is repeated all over this sparsely-poulated country. In the summers, a vast number of people leave towns and use their summer-places in the countryside - another tradition that's been going-on for the last couple of centuries. In the summer of 2020 I was in Stockholm, and would often be the only person eating in a restaurant that would normally be packed with people.

All of these factors helped Sweden to keep down what would otherwise have been even more catastrophic numbers of dead. Which isn't to say that the number of people who did die - often without any medical care whatsoever in the case of many elderly people in homes that were supposed to be somehow 'protected' from the pandemic - is not a massive tragedy, that Swedes themselves hardly talk about any longer. Because it really was both a callous loss of life, and a traumatic triumph of selfishness over common welfare.