In Iceland, aggressive track-and-trace policies, effective quarantining, and closed borders had the country’s infection peak in early April. Soon enough we all forgot about them and their single-digit deaths.
Instead Sweden became the black sheep. The stubborn outlier kept its society comparatively open. Shops and cafés and workplaces introduced some changes, like putting screens between customers and shop-workers. The Scandinavian nation leveraged its high internet accessibility to work from home, and public policy and persona alike appealed to common-sense behavior – like staying at home if ill, keeping physical distance, and using sanitizer (though not as religiously as the Icelanders).
While pundits of either ideological persuasion lined up to defend it or attack it, Sweden’s elderly population kept dying. The strategy’s focus on openness, we were told, was directly to blame for care homes being unable to shield their vulnerable residents.
Except, it turned out, that the elderly and those in nursing homes elsewhere were dying all the same: in New York, in England, in Italy, in New Orleans, stringent government restrictions or not.
Hellbound and Down 
