Sustainable Post Covid19 Lockdown Strategy Through Evidence-Based Policy

Abstract

The Covid19 epidemic is having much larger fatalities in western Europe than everywhere else in the world. However, the greater peak daily fatalities have been 10 to 20 times less than the models’ predictions and similarly occurred after half the time predicted by the models. Similar patterns of the outbreak have been achieved regardless of diversity in the containment measures. Thanks to a strict, generalized, lockdown, the United Kingdom, or Belgium, had after about the same number of days, much larger peak daily fatalities per million than countries adopting more sustainable approaches such as the Netherlands or Sweden. In the Netherlands, social distancing is suggested but not forced through an “intelligent lockdown”. In Sweden, there is simply no lockdown. It is now evident that Covid19 is much less contagious and lethal than what was thought, and if care is taken of the risk categories, but basic freedom is not removed restricting every movement of the healthy population damaging democracy and economy, it is possible to achieve better results. With fatalities uniformly declining across Europe, it is therefore advocated to return the sooner the better as before the lockdown period, with full compliance with preventive health instructions and social divergence, and care to protect the highest-risk groups from infection, especially for the elderly and those with chronic and respiratory diseases.