What would be the consequences of opening everything up tomorrow?

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The ski pistes are open, the restaurants are doing ample business and the malls are awash with shoppers.

Welcome to Sweden, the last holdout among the small number of Western countries to have taken a radically different approach to the coronavirus pandemic.

While social life in Europe and much of the U.S. now centers on the home after governments imposed increasingly drastic curbs on freedom of movement, Sweden left offices and stores open, issued recommendations rather than restrictions, and waited to see what happens.

Businesses, kindergartens and schools remain open. After a long winter, Stockholm’s street cafes and outdoor bars swelled with people over the weekend, and the city’s old town drew large crowds as locals ventured out to enjoy the good weather. The only mandatory rules are a ban on meetings of more than 50 people and an order forcing bars and restaurants to only serve seated customers so as to avoid overcrowding

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It is too early to assess whether Sweden’s approach will have a benign or catastrophic outcome, but so far, the virus hasn’t spread widely there. Sweden, with 10 million inhabitants, had 4,028 confirmed infections and 146 deaths by Monday, according to a tally compiled by Johns Hopkins University. Austria, a similarly-sized European country with about 8.8 million people that is under lockdown, had 9,200 cases and 108 deaths.

Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s chief epidemiologist and architect of the policy, says the approach, much like the original British one, is to let the virus spread as slow as possible while sheltering the elderly and the vulnerable until much of the population becomes naturally immune or a vaccine becomes available.

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That would be fricking horrible.

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There is a lag between social distancing measures and outcomes. We are just starting to see their effect.

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So if you opened everything up you would get all of the downside of the economy being closed these past few weeks with virtually none of the upside on health.

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You would get a faster recovery, but not really since everything would just shut down again once it becomes apparent that hospitals are overloaded.

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The Media and the Left would need to be ventilated from their hyperventilating

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