What is a lockdown?
There was a lot of heated talk about lockdown during the Covid crisis, but what is it? How much lockdown was implemented in European countries?
Prior to the Covid pandemic, quarantine was a widely known term in the context of communicable diseases - the isolation of people or animals or a specific area to prevent the spread of infectious diseases and pests and to eradicate their infestation.
The regulations and orders during Covid-19 also laid down exactly who had to be quarantined, how, and for how long – in Estonia, they were people who tested positive (until cured) and their close contacts (for 7 days, 5 days towards the end of the pandemic).
As a concept close to quarantine, the expression 'isolation' was widely used in the official guidelines of the Covid crisis. In general, isolation means separating a sick person from the healthy until recovered, and quarantine means separating a potential carrier of a disease until it is confirmed that he or she is not sick anymore – but in the case of Covid-19, no clear line was drawn between these different statuses. Perhaps for this reason, positive test results were obtained en masse and even those who tested negative could be viewed suspiciously as asymptomatic or presymptomatic virus carriers.
The definition of lockdown – one of the most notorious measures of a pandemic – is more confusing than quarantine or isolation. Generally, the English expression was also used in other languages: der Lockdown (in German), il lockdown (in Italian), etc.
Collins' dictionary, which declared ‘lockdown’ the word of the year 2020 in terms of its frequency of use, explains the word in the context of a pandemic as "the imposition of the strictest restrictions on travel, people-to-people contact and access to public spaces".
In the past, the word was used in a different context - lockdown also meant (and still means) a temporary security measure in prisons, where all prisoners are deprived of access to common areas of the prison and locked in their cells. It also refers to a security measure in a school or other building, for example in the event of a terrorist attack, where people in the building are temporarily prevented from leaving their premises.
Particularly large-scale quarantine (which does not work)
It could also be said that lockdown is a newer term for a particularly broad quarantine. For example, Donald Henderson, best known as the head of the smallpox programme, and other epidemiologists, wrote in a 2006 article published in the journal Biosecurity and Bioterrorism: "The negative consequences of large-scale quarantine are so extreme (forced confinement of sick people with the well; complete restriction of movement of large populations; difficulty in getting critical supplies, medicines, and food to people inside the quarantine zone) that this mitigation measure should be eliminated from serious consideration." The same conclusion had been reached in many other pre-Covdi pandemic studies and official reports.
The question of why the world turned to lockdowns in Covid-19 and what good or bad it did deserves a separate article. In this article, we will try to clarify where the boundary between 'normal' antivirus policy and lockdown lies – i.e. at what point can restrictions on people's lives be called a lockdown?
Media reports in 2020 suggested that Sweden was more or less the only country that did not go along with the "fashion" that had taken over the rest of the world, at least initially. In fact, there were others, too – Japan, Belarus, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tanzania, and several Brazilian and US states.
However, already in the spring of 2020, the stringency of the rules and their enforcement varied from country to country, and the picture became even more confusing thereafter. Each country's lockdown was different in its details and even in some of the larger elements. This fact makes comparisons difficult, and in countries with fewer restrictions, it offers pandemic restrictionists a 'backstop' – a way of arguing that we didn't have a lockdown.
Tool for comparing constraints
The best-known tool for comparing the severity of restrictions is the Oxford University Blavatnik School of Government's pandemic policy database and indices.
The index was compiled on the basis of publicly available information across nine areas of action. From these, an aggregate score was derived on a scale of 0 to 100, with 0 indicating no restrictions and 100 indicating the most stringent restrictions. Data is available for the period March 2020 to March 2023, after which the project was closed with the declaration of the end of the pandemic.
During the pandemic, the OurWorldInData.org website made it very convenient and easy to see how tight the restrictions were in any given country. For example, a comparison of two European countries – Estonia and Sweden – offers quite an interesting picture. In April 2020, the Stringency Index was at a high of 78 for Estonia and 65 for Sweden, which meant a lockdown-free reputation for both. In the following two years, Sweden's Stringency Index was even higher than Estonia's in some places.
How to explain it? The subtleties of calculating the index, i.e. the quantitative comparison of national Covid policies, are explained in the working paper "Variation in government responses to COVID-19". The Stringency Index measures the extent of restrictions on school and workplace closures, public gatherings, public transport, domestic and international travel, and "stay at home".
For example, the index distinguishes between four levels of "stay at home" restrictions:
0 - no measures,
1 - recommend not leaving house,
2 - require not leaving house with exceptions for daily exercise, grocery shopping, and 'essential' trips,
3 - require not leaving house with minimal exceptions (eg allowed to leave once a week, or only one person can leave at a time, etc).
For example, for international travel, the index also distinguishes between four levels: 0 - no restrictions, 1 - screening arrivals, 2 - quarantine arrivals from some or all regions, 3 – ban arrivals from some region, 4 – ban on all regions or total border closure.
As Sweden, with its lockdown-free reputation, had recommendations (or partial restrictions) on many of the policies included in the restraint index, their restraint index was also much higher than usual during the pandemic. Sweden also applied quite strict entry restrictions for almost the entire duration of the pandemic. By contrast, Estonia (like most European countries) was more dynamic than the others in implementing the ban, i.e. it was relatively quick to suspend or reintroduce it, rather than to recommend it.
But what is the answer to the question of whether, for example, lockdowns were implemented in most of Europe, based on this index? Undoubtedly, many countries were locked down in April-May 2020, but for most of the rest of the pandemic period, the index was also well above ‘normal time’ (0) in most countries. Only in July-August 2021 did some countries (Estonia, for example) come back from the restrictions to a level quite close to normal (20-23), but then went into larger restrictions again, which lasted until April 2022.
Burdensome measures not covered by the index
Measures that are not included in the index of restrictions, but are nevertheless overwhelming, are a separate issue. For example, mask mandates – on a scale of 0-4, Sweden implemented level 2 for the masks (required in public spaces in some situations) for about two weeks in the winter of 2021, while Estonia did so for the entire period, with a short break, of November 2020 to April 2022. In many European countries, the mandatory wearing of masks lasted for almost two years in a row.
The table below shows a small fraction of the data underlying the constraints index to help better understand how this index was calculated. On such a 2 to 4 point scale (in addition to a code of 0 indicating no restrictions), many nuances are of course lost, and it does not reflect the severity of the enforcement of restrictions or the tonality of the injunctions.
Compared to, for example, Italy, which was one of the first European adopters of the Chinese lockdown policy, Estonia's Covid policy was indeed more „liberal“, but not so liberal that the word could be used here without quotation marks.
Indicators used to calculate the Covid Stringency Index. Example of four countries on four dates.
In conclusion, it is important to ask: are lockdowns as a method at all effective in limiting the spread of the virus? One way to assess this is to look at the statistics on excess mortality by country. As the graph clearly shows, Sweden had the lowest level of excess mortality among European countries between 2020 and 2022, being also lower than its closest neighbours, with whom the picture should be compared in particular.
So it cannot be said that the strict lockdown policy has in any way justified itself, quite the contrary. It is therefore a little difficult to understand the often-stated claim by lockdown advocates that societies would not have been able to cope with the scale of Swedish mortality during the first wave. The reference is to the fact that it was a new and unknown disease, and at the same time there was a lack of both personal protection and understanding of the nature of the disease. In other words, they argue that restrictions were necessary in order to push down the infection curve (flatten the curve), to purchase sufficient personal protective equipment for medical workers, to gain experience in treating and preventing a new disease, and to prepare the medical system as a whole to deal with Covid-19 patients. If this was justified, why did Sweden's tactics ultimately produce a better outcome in terms of deaths?
In fact, a number of reputable researchers have shown that locking countries down was of no use. Harvard University medical professor Martin Kulldorff and Stanford University medical professor Jay Bhattacharya proved this with data as early as March 2022.
Lancaster University law professor David Campbell and Durham University professor of finance and economics Kevin Dowd criticise the Imperial College model that underpinned Britain's lockdown policy, which predicted more than half a million deaths there if lockdowns were not implemented, but relied on absurd assumptions on closer inspection, which is particularly evident in hindsight. In their analysis, the professors conclude that „the ‘lockdown’ policy adopted in response to an outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 has been the worst example of government failure in peacetime history.”