King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden and Queen Silvia, his wife, tested positive for the coronavirus on Monday night, the Royal Court states in a statement on Tuesday.

The king, who is 75, and the queen, who is 78, “have mild symptoms and feel well under the circumstances,” the statement said. Both were fully vaccinated and had received booster shots.

The statement said the royal couple had “isolated themselves in the home in accordance with current rules of conduct, and infection tracing is ongoing.”

Sweden has been something of an outlier in Europe in its response to the pandemic. While other European countries introduced locks in March 2020, hoping to flatten into a steeply rising curve of new infections, Sweden kept the country open and asked residents to voluntarily follow health regulations.

Although Sweden remained better off than some countries that applied strict closures, the first months of the pandemic were much more deadly in Sweden than in many of its neighbors, and in December 2020, King Carl XVI Gustaf called the nation’s coronavirus policy a failure due to lost lives. .

Since then, Sweden has seen large increases in cases during the winter and spring of 2021, and new cases are soaring again now that the highly transferable Omicron variant is spreading in large parts of the world.