Sweden attracted worldwide attention earlier this year when it stayed open throughout the first months of the coronavirus pandemic, and now it is holding out again, this time refusing to recommend the use of masks.
While most of the world has come to terms with covering their noses and mouths in crowded places, people in Sweden are going without, riding buses and metros, shopping for food, and going to school maskless, with only a few rare souls covering up.
Public health officials there argue that masks are not effective enough at limiting the spread of the virus to warrant mass use, insisting it is more important to respect social distancing and hand-washing recommendations.
The Scandinavian country has the world's seventh highest death toll at 575 per million inhabitants, mainly due to its failure to protect the elderly in nursing homes in the early stages of the pandemic.
Sweden never closed its schools, businesses or cafes and restaurants, allowing the virus to circulate, and has therefore had a consistently high level of community transmission.
But unlike many countries in Europe seeing a resurgence of cases - such as France, the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, Spain and Italy - Sweden's data now seems to be pointing in the right direction: down.
Its daily death toll peaked in April and is now down to a couple of deaths a day, the number of cases have been in steady decline since early June, and its R-number has pretty much stayed under 1 since early July.
Health agency director-general Johan Carlson told a press conference on 18 August that there may be situations - such as doctor and dentist visits and on public transport - where face mask recommendations could be issued.
State epidemiologist Anders Tegnell of the Public Health Agency insists scientific studies have not proven that masks are effective in limiting the spread of the virus, suggesting they can do more harm than good if used sloppily.
"There are at least three heavyweight reports - from the World Health Organization, the ECDC and The Lancet report that the WHO cites - which all state that the scientific evidence is weak. We haven't carried out our own assessment," he recently told reporters.
Meanwhile, Spain has registered more than 23,000 new coronavirus cases since Friday, health emergency chief Fernando Simon told a news conference today, suggesting the infection rate had declined slightly from a peak reached the previous week.
Health ministry data showed 2,489 new cases were diagnosed in the past 24 hours, while the cumulative total of cases since the onset of the pandemic hit 462,858.
Five people died in the past day, bringing the total death toll to 29,094, the data showed.
The latest statistics could be modified in future as Spain retroactively adjusts its daily data.
The United Kingdom recorded 1,406 daily confirmed cases of Covid-19, according to government data published today, down from 1,715 a day earlier.
Two people died within 28 days of testing positive for the disease, the daily statistics release said, bringing the total death toll under that measure to 41,501.
