Sweden doesn’t appear interested in revising its pandemic online casino strategy even as COVID-19 forces the government to revise its land-based gambling strategy.  

On Monday, Sweden’s Spelinspektionen gambling regulatory body announced that restaurant casinos and other alcoholic watering holes featuring slot machines will need to halt gambling activity after 10pm each night. The new rules, which took effect Friday (20), are currently slated to extend through the end of February 2021.

The change comes as the government ordered a halt in the sale of alcohol between 10pm and 11am each day in a bid to blunt the sharp rise in new COVID-19 infections over the past month or so. Along with the alcohol curbs, the number of Swedes allowed to gather in public has shrunk from groups of 50 to just eight.

Sweden formerly bucked the global pattern of strict lockdowns, relying instead on optional recommendations that initially seemed to be achieving the elusive ‘herd immunity.’ But the country’s number of cases is nearing 210k while deaths have jumped to over 6,400, leading Prime Minister Stevan Löfven to issue blunt instructions on Sunday to cancel or postpone “all the things you would like to do but that are not necessary.”