Why Sweden remains mask-free

Masks may only have been mandatory in British shops since yesterday, and British airports for a couple of months, but what I saw as I arrived in Sweden this past week already felt oddly transgressive, almost indecent. At no point on the journey does anyone tell you that you can remove your face mask, so when we landed in Stockholm, my fellow passengers on the quarter-full SAS flight from Heathrow kept them on up the gangway and into the airport terminal. Then you notice that the customs officers aren’t wearing them as they check your passport, nor the airport staff swooshing around on silent scooters, but you keep it on just in case. Only when you finally emerge from the baggage hall and into the row of waiting taxis do you realise: nobody is wearing one. Not a single person. In Sweden, it’s a mask-free world. In central Stockholm the restaurants and shops are busy, even if less busy than they might normally be; there’s a table-service-only rule, so many bars have queues of patient Swedes outside to avoid any overcrowding inside. The outside watering holes of Stureplan and along the waterfront at Strandvägen are positively booming. There’s nothing reckless or denialist about the atmosphere here; nor anything of the grim experiment-gone-wrong that much of the international media would have you believe about a country which did not impose a national lockdown. People are behaving responsibly, social distancing where possible, but determined to continue the serious business of living their lives. In the warm sunshine of a Stockholm evening, I got a sense of a people for whom unencumbered enjoyment of their brief summer — those precious moments of beauty and levity and warmth on the skin — is not a “nice-to-have” that should be surrendered on an uncertain cautionary principle. It is something closer to a human right.