Faced with what many there believe will be a manageable illness, Sweden has decided – for now at least – that lockdown represents a greater risk

Now and again, my wife asks if it’s worth getting Swedish passports for our children. She has never got around to seeking British citizenship and I try to tell her that she’d better get her skates on before Priti Patel comes around asking for her papers. But the kids: how would a Swedish passport possibly benefit them? We run through what might go wrong for a country and, in every eventuality, Britain always seems the better bet. But now Swedes have a fresh argument: that their country might be the only one in Europe to come out of the corona crisis with the economy semi-intact.

There is, still, no lockdown there. Shopping centres remain open, as are most schools and firms. Many work from home, many don’t – all are at liberty to choose. When I called a friend in Stockholm to ask about the Swedish experiment, he was on his way to a book launch. He’s still taking his sons to football matches and is proud that Sweden is keeping calm and carrying on. To him there is no Swedish experiment: it’s the rest of Europe that is experimenting – by locking down economies in response to a virus which may prove to be no more deadly than flu.