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International News Title: 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. Tegnell makes no secret of the fact that he is baffled by other countries' rush to mandate face masks. "The evidence base for using masks in society is still very weak," he tells me - despite lots of countries now mandating them in different ways "we haven't seen any new evidence coming up, which is a little bit surprising I can say." He believes that masks may be counter-productive as people then forget social distancing and even go out when they are ill, which ends up increasing the spread of the disease. And most importantly, things are going perfectly well without them. "At a time like right now, when we have extremely few admissions into hospitals and the total number of cases is rapidly falling, it is not the time to introduce something else." Decisions are taken entirely by the health agency with almost no involvement from politicians, which lowers the temperature from the outset. Anders Tegnell is a physician and technocrat with no voters to please or polls to fret about. Perhaps a culture's readiness to change on a sixpence to a "new normal" is inversely correlated to their affection for, and confidence in, the "old normal." The Swedes like their way of life, and are enviably reluctant to give it up.
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