All Eyes On The Swedish Coronavirus Experiment

From UnHerd ➤how Sweden is responding to the Covid-19.

By Freddie Sayers.

My Swedish passport has always felt a bit like a secret weapon. As a half-Swede who grew up in England, I have wielded it on countless occasions to get out of scrapes and escape judgement. As a national brand, it is almost beyond reproach — you flash your passport and sail through customs in countries from Israel to Sudan, greeted by special smiles of welcome like a visiting dignitary. Survey after survey confirms the same thing: everybody loves the Swedes.

Politically, the Swedes have long served as pin-ups for both the Left and Right. Bernie Sanders makes constant reference to Sweden as a model for his brand of ‘democratic socialism’, while David Cameron used to regularly seek inspiration from his Swedish counterparts on ideas as diverse as free schools, the Big Society and doing away with inheritance tax. More recently, the Right has invoked Swedish concerns about mass immigration as proof that it’s not only baddies who worry about that issue. Whatever your politics, if the Swedes are doing it, it must be OK.

Suddenly, in its response to the Coronavirus, the behaviour of my mother country is not meeting with the usual chorus of approval. By taking a radically different approach, have the Swedes finally lost their famed good sense… or should the rest of the world once again be looking to their example?

Continue reading @ UnHerd.