Sweden’s Covid-19 policy is a model for the right. It’s also a deadly folly | Nick Cohen

The Swedes were the Brexiters' poster nation, but now have Europe's worst death rate

• Coronavirus - latest updates
• Tell us: have you been affected by the coronavirus?

Covid-19 is nature's way of making bad situations worse. From the moment it turned the world upside down, you could have predicted that the Chinese Communist party would have arrested whistleblowers and covered up the threat to humanity. It's what it does best, after all.

You would not have needed mystical powers to divine that Viktor Orban would have used a pandemic as an excuse to turn Hungary into the European Union's first dictatorship. Nor did it take a modern Nostradamus to foresee that, if you put men who care nothing for competence, complexity, or the difference between truth and falsehood in power, you will live to regret it. Or in the case of tens of thousands who trusted Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, die needless deaths.