Sweden sounds like could be the right approach. Went JSO with pasting about half the article, since behind a paywall.
The ski pistes are open, the restaurants are doing ample business and the malls are awash with shoppers.
Welcome to Sweden, the last holdout among the small number of Western countries to have taken a radically different approach to the coronavirus pandemic.
.....Sweden left offices and stores open, issued recommendations rather than restrictions, and waited to see what happens.
Businesses, kindergartens and schools remain open. After a long winter, Stockholm’s street cafes and outdoor bars swelled with people over the weekend, and the city’s old town drew large crowds as locals ventured out to enjoy the good weather. The only mandatory rules are a ban on meetings of more than 50 people and an order forcing bars and restaurants to only serve seated customers so as to avoid overcrowding....
...It is too early to assess whether Sweden’s approach will have a benign or catastrophic outcome, but so far, the virus hasn’t spread widely there. Sweden, with 10 million inhabitants, had 4,028 confirmed infections and 146 deaths by Monday, according to a tally compiled by Johns Hopkins University. Austria, a similarly-sized European country with about 8.8 million people that is under lockdown, had 9,200 cases and 108 deaths.
Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s chief epidemiologist and architect of the policy, says the approach, much like the original British one, is to let the virus spread as slow as possible while sheltering the elderly and the vulnerable until much of the population becomes naturally immune or a vaccine becomes available.
....Sweden has a long tradition of favoring voluntary guidelines—which call on the elderly to self-isolate and the young to reduce social mobility—over coercive measures. Dr. Tegnell said that could lead to higher compliance.
“A majority of people will stay home if they get symptoms,” he said. “We want to slow down the epidemic until Sweden experiences some sort of peak, and if the peak is not too dramatic we can continue.”
Unlike in the U.K., there is little sign of a backlash against the voluntary approach from a worried public. A Novus poll last week showed 80% of people approved of a speech by Prime Minister Stefan Löfven, in which he appealed to the personal responsibility of each adult citizen to prevent the disease’s spread.
In Stockholm this past weekend, more people appeared to avoid closed spaces than the previous weekend, and travelers on public transport were sitting apart from each other. Some Stockholmers are staying home and many skiers have cut short their trips to popular resorts such as Åre. The number of people using Stockholm’s underground and commuter trains dropped by 50% last week, according to Storstockholms Lokaltrafik, the public transport company.
Some European experts and officials, including Ansgar Lohse, a prominent German doctor, and Sir Patrick Vallance, chief scientific adviser to the British government, have praised the approach.
But even some of these proponents say it might be hard to replicate outside the specific context of Scandinavia. In Swedish culture, they note, generations don’t interact as much as they do in, say Italy. More than half of Swedish households consist of a single person, according to official data. This means less risk of younger people passing on the virus to their elders.
It may also explain why a disproportionate number of Sweden’s Covid-19 deaths occurred within the country’s Somali community, whose members tend to live in cramped accommodation in poorer neighborhoods, with more intergenerational mingling and less access to government information....
https://www.wsj.com/articles/inside-swe ... 1585598175