The best measurement of that is excess deaths — that is, how many more deaths did the county have during the pandemic compared with a pre-Covid baseline? By that metric, Sweden did the best, as we read in this article.
What is so revealing about this is that at the beginning of the panic over Covid, writers were wringing their hands that Sweden’s non-panicky policy was going to have terrible consequences. They weren’t going to wait for results; they felt it necessary to denounce Sweden’s reliance on sensible individual precautions rather than government diktats. Why? I think the reason is obvious — they are ideologically committed to government power.
No matter what the issue, our writers always favor government and disdain the idea things might work out best if people are left free to search for what’s optimal. It never occurs to them that there could be bad unintended consequences from reliance on governmental experts, who rarely if ever admit mistakes and change course. And they don’t want to advance the classical liberal concept that the spontaneous order of a free society produces superior results compared to top-down control by officials.
Hat tip: Don Boudreaux