IIt’s the start of the new school year in Sweden, and the highly contagious delta variant is starting to hit the country hard, with cases having doubled since the end of July, reports Richard Orange.

In many countries that would mean one thing: containment. But not in Sweden.

Sweden’s decision to avoid the lockdown and leave pubs, restaurants, shopping malls and primary schools open throughout the pandemic has sparked furious discussions internationally.

Millions of people around the world have been confined to their homes, watched businesses go bankrupt and struggled to stay on top of their education amid wave after wave of restrictions to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

But for some 10 million Swedes, the eighteen months since the registration of the first local case of Covid-19 last February have been largely trivial.

That’s not to say the virus hasn’t wreaked havoc – nearly 15,000 people have died in total, around 1,450 per million. But this death rate is lower than the average for the European Union as a whole (1,684), and much lower than that of France, Spain, Italy and the United Kingdom.

Some now admit that Sweden did not become the uplifting story many predicted.

To learn more about ‘The Sweden Experiment’ read Richard’s story here