Dr. Tomás Ryan:

I thank the Deputy for the question. I think it is obvious that we are more like European countries than Asian countries. Although we should learn from the best performing countries in Asia, looking around Europe also makes sense. Scandinavia seems to be one of the best performing areas of Europe. We pay a lot of attention to Sweden. Some of this is in the context of herd immunity although it does not seem that is Sweden's policy right now. The aim is to have a more livable situation in the long term with Covid-19 in an effort to reduce restrictions. Everybody here wants to reduce restrictions. That is the point of the zero Covid policy. However, when we compare Scandinavian countries against each other we see that the best performer by far is Finland. It has had the least number of deaths, the least number of infections both when they were flattening their curve and now when they are maintaining the flat curve. Sweden had about seven times as many deaths as Finland and Denmark while they were flattening their curve but there is no evidence of a large degree of immunity after that. Today Sweden, Norway and Finland are maintaining a relatively flat curve but Finland is definitely the best performer there now.

It is important to remember that the reasons countries are maintaining a flat curve are not related to how they flattened their curve in the first place. Some countries may have flattened the curve by hard lockdown, some by soft lockdown and some by aggressive testing, tracing and isolation like in South Korea and Taiwan. How to maintain the curve is an entirely different story. Clearly Sweden, Norway and Finland are doing an excellent job at social distancing, physical distancing, hygiene etc. There is nothing to criticise there in terms of Sweden's response. I do criticise how they flattened the curve but that is another discussion. It seems to me that by any measure, including economic measures, Finland seems to be the best performing country in Scandinavia. I do admit that they are rightly quite worried that cases are starting to rise there also.