Five years on: The countries that never locked down for Covid-19

Most of the world found itself confined to their homes in March 2020 as Covid-19 spread at a blistering pace. Some countries didn't impose any lockdown restrictions – so was their decision the right one?

In March 2020, billions of people stared out through their windows at a world they no longer recognised. Suddenly confined to their homes, their lives had shrunk abruptly to four walls and computer screens.

Around the world, national leaders appeared on television, telling them to stay put – only leave the house to buy essential supplies or for once-daily exercise, maybe. It was a last-ditch attempt to curb the spread of a terrifying virus that had already killed many thousands of people worldwide.

In London, theatre worker Tony Beckingham and his partner decided to use their daily exercise to cycle into the centre of the city one evening. "We thought it'd be really fun to see no-one around," he says. It wasn't. Places the pair knew well, like Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square, perennially abuzz with people, were chillingly quiet. "It was really upsetting – instantly," says Beckingham.

This deletion of the public from city streets, venues and businesses first began in China, where Covid-19 emerged. Quarantine orders were soon replicated in other countries after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a pandemic on 11 March 2020. At no prior point in human history have people faced restrictions like this on such a scale.

But a handful of countries did things differently. Sweden, Taiwan, Uruguay, Iceland and a few others never enacted a lockdown that involved severe restrictions on the movement of people, such as legally binding stay-at-home orders applied across large swathes of the population. Those countries instead chose other measures, such as restrictions on large gatherings of people, extensive testing and quarantining infected people or travel restrictions.

Five years later, the scientific studies and data have piled up, offering a detailed, long-term assessment of whether these countries were right to reject this most drastic of public health interventions.

The Swedish city of Gothenburg is a haven for dog-lovers, says HR and blogger Anna Mc Manus, "We have a very dog-friendly city here," she says. "We even have a dog-friendly cinema." As countries around the world, including Sweden's neighbours Norway, Finland and Denmark, ushered in national lockdowns in March 2020, Mc Manus was aware that her own government had decided to buck the trend.

She heard how dog owners in some nations couldn't even take their pets out for walks because of lockdown rules. South Africa was one such country. This struck Mc Manus as terrible. At the time, she wrote a blog post in which she said, "I am convinced that my government is acting in a secure and correct way". However, she also expressed concern that her fellow Swedes were not always following the official public health guidelines around social distancing, such as limiting the number of people who could meet together in a group.

Mc Manus re taking frequent walks in beauty spots, but also that she and her colleagues continually wore masks to help prevent Covid-19 transmission at the veterinary hospital where she worked in 2020. Plus, she and her partner avoided restaurants and meeting up with lots of other people. Even now, Mc Manus says she is not sure what to make of Sweden's official strategy.

"I want to base it on facts – like how many people died," she says. "Could we have saved a lot more people if we had had a lockdown">window._taboola = window._taboola || []; _taboola.push({ mode: 'alternating-thumbnails-a', container: 'taboola-below-article', placement: 'Below Article', target_type: 'mix' });