When Sweden announced that its approach to the COVID-19 pandemic was to not enact the extreme rules everyone else was and, instead, just take the minimum precautions, they were dragged the world over.

Now, they’re laughing with increasingly clear and healthy lungs.

According to Newsweek, Europe is seeing another surge in Coronavirus cases with the exception of Sweden who is still seeing a marked decline since June:

The number of new cases per 100,000 people in Sweden reported over the last 14 days since July 29 dropped by 54 percent from the figure reported over 14 days prior to then, according to the latest report Wednesday from the World Health Organization (WHO).

Meanwhile, other parts of Europe have reported large spikes in new cases over the same period, including Spain, France, Germany, Belgium and The Netherlands, which have seen increases between 40 and 200 percent over the last month, according to the latest WHO report Wednesday.

The seven-day rolling average of Sweden’s daily new cases has been dropping consistently since June 29. Its daily case count has been mostly decreasing since June 24, when it reported 1,803 new infections, its largest single-day spike since the outbreak began, according to data compiled by Worldometer.

The seven-day rolling average of daily new deaths in Sweden has also been declining since around April 15, when it reported a record daily death count of 115. The country’s latest seven-day rolling averages for daily new cases and daily new deaths stand at 154 and 2.

Here’s what that looks like in graph form.

Sweden update 31 July. Zero deaths in past 3 days; 5 in the past week. No lockdowns, no masks, no panic. pic.twitter.com/4CLTBB01nT

— Paul Yowell (@pwyowell) July 31, 2020

The only downside to Sweden’s strategy was that there did have a higher death percentage than the other countries but Sweden was even able to take action to curb that and their strategy has now been labeled a success “to a great extent” according to Anders Tegnell, the chief epidemiologist at Sweden’s public health agency.

Sweden is enjoying healthy people with an economy that is really no worse for the wear. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is locking themselves away in their homes and cowering, even to the point of lashing out at others who wish to get back out in the world and conduct business as usual in order to save their families and livelihoods.

In American, you can get arrested for opening up your business or going to church, however protesting in the name of Black Lives Matter — the west’s most popular political party that pretends it’s not a political party — is perfectly fine.

Imagine where we would be right now if we as Americans had never panicked, had never hidden, had never obeyed. Imagine how many jobs people would still have to provide for their families, how many businesses that were brought up from nothing would still be open, and how many people would still be alive and well because they weren’t tempted by suicide, drugs, or alcohol in their desperation.

You may return by telling me that we would have had a lot more people wind up dead, but if we had kept level heads then we would have figured out how to protect our most vulnerable without collapsing our entire economy. The only thing we would have had to contend with would have been Grethen Whitmer and Andrew Cuomo throwing healthy elderly and sick into COVID-ridden nursing homes for money.

It’s time to drop this nonsense. If cases spike, they spike. Let our immune systems do what they do best and help us develop a herd immunity. We can’t take any more of this as a nation. We shouldn’t take more of it.

Following Sweden’s lead at this point seems to be the right course of action, and it’s seemed like it has been for some time.