“WE didn’t realise how closed Scotland is.” I wasn’t surprised to hear this from some tourists from England who had come up to spend a few days in the central belt, only to be disappointed by closures, restricted opening hours, and the uneasy sense of passing through a ghost town.

Some friends from Stirling put it the other way round. They went to the Manchester for a weekend and couldn’t believe how lively it was compared to back home.

Our window cleaner and his mates around Dumfries are still travelling to Carlisle to drink in a pub that feels welcoming, relaxed and Old Normal. They started when English pubs were serving alcohol and Scottish ones weren’t allowed to.

They keep up the tradition now even though they don’t strictly have to because they prefer the more convivial experience. “It’s mair fun”, he says

I see on Twitter that a gastropub in Berwick on Tweed has painted one of those ‘stand here’ circles on its floor that reads: “Please wait here until you realise that your government is brainwashing you.”

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We could do with rolling these out throughout Scotland because if you never get out of the country, it’s easy to forget how moribund and shut-down life here feels, compared to England, which opened up in most respects back on ‘Freedom Day’ on July 19th.

Nicola Sturgeon’s Covid measures have been tougher and longer than those south of the Border. As I write, hardcore lockdown zealots are currently heaping pressure on Boris Johnson to execute Plan B – working from home, masks in some public spaces, vaccine passports for clubs – but for the time being in England there is something approaching a feeling of normality.

Scotland, on the other hand, has turned into a country gripped by a permanent state of emergency.

And all the COP26 shenanigans – ferrying around the world’s political elite while the needs of the little people – long-awaited hospital appointments, for example – are swept aside – act as a further deterrent to obstinate citizens who persist in trying to go out.

Scotland and England are different worlds these days, the former still sunk in an abyss of Covid trepidation, the latter tentatively stepping out into the light to reprise the breadth of its former life.

Looking further afield, the contrasts are even more striking.

It’s now over a month since Norway, Sweden and Denmark removed all Covid restrictions, mask mandates, stopped social distancing and rejected vaccine passports, QR codes, and kindred paraphernalia of Covid ‘prevention’.

Norwegian airlines do not even ask you to wear a mask when flying within Scandinavia. Yet Norway’s seven-day average Covid death count is down to just one person.

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In Scandinavia, you’ll struggle to find behaviour-modifying dots on the floor or plexiglass dividers. The streets of Stockholm, Copenhagen, and Oslo are just as they always were. People are just living their lives there with no more state interference than usual.

Sweden, of course, very sensibly kept its cool while other countries lost their heads. It didn’t go down the lockdown path.

Instead it informed its citizens of Covid risks in a proportionate, rational manner, stressing the heightened risk to the very old and medically vulnerable, but kept its society open.

Now Sweden sits way down at position 54 in Worldometer’s league table showing total deaths with Covid since the pandemic began.

In fact, for the four weeks after ending all restrictions, new Covid cases in Sweden are lower than in any other European country.

In the UK, for all our lockdowns we occupy position 27, not the worst, but exactly half as good as Sweden.

With hindsight we can reflect that the Swedish government, which chose to trust its citizens to make shrewd personal decisions and act responsibly, has delivered infinitely better health and economic outcomes than states like ours that treated their population like quasi-criminal teenagers.

It’s striking that almost all the countries with higher death rates than Sweden also score highly on the ‘stringency index’.

In other words, countries that brought in the toughest measures have generally had the highest death rates.

Peru, for instance, Number One in the world league for deaths, imposed one of the earliest and strictest lockdowns anywhere in March 2020. It took “Go earlier; Go harder’ sentiment to chilling extremes: anyone who ventured out after curfew was met by armed soldiers.

Yet what did Peru achieve? A world-leading death toll and avoidable economic catastrophe that will hobble its people for decades.

Cases in Lithuania, Sweden’s Baltic neighbour, are currently 1,650% higher than Sweden. Yet Lithuania has imposed Draconian, I’d call them inhumane, restrictions that make working or feeding your family there almost impossible without a government vaccine (medical apartheid) ‘pass’.

If we turn to the US, the same disjunction between the stringency of anti-Covid measures and desirable outcomes socks you between the eyes.

Florida now has the lowest rate of new cases of all 50 states, even though its governor Ron DeSantis has consistently followed a different Covid strategy to states like depressed and edgy New York and California, which have destructively and pointlessly curtailed their citizens lives.

“In Florida, there will be no lockdowns, there will be no school closures, there will be no restrictions and no mandates” DeSantis says. “Your livelihood should not be dependent upon whether you get a Covid shot. “This is a personal decision.”

Authoritarian Wales, despite its new vaccine passports that were squeezed through because of one errant vote, its perpetual mask mandates, its extra-long lockdowns, and supposedly the best vaccine roll-out in the UK, currently has the fourth worst infection rate in the world, the second highest in Europe after Latvia.

There’s a lesson here for Scotland. This dismal performance is where fixating on a virus with a 0.096 infection mortality rate to the exclusion of all wider social, economic, and health concerns gets you.

I wish Nicola Sturgeothe n would learn from Sweden’s effective and sustainable approach and rethink her Covid strategy.

It’s stubborn and stupid to keep doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results.

Our columns are a platform for writers to express their opinions. They do not necessarily represent the views of The Herald.