Sweden’s low positive test rate ‘vindicates coronavirus strategy’

Yes they have the fift worst mortality per capita in Europe excluding microstates (Andorra, San Marino).

It is the 11th worst mortality in the world, again excluding the same two microstates.

Not sure how one can "vindicate" a strategy that lead to that, unless you imagine scenarios where the rest of the countries have huge moralities due to second wave, and Sweden somehow ends up on the other side of the table, with 11th best in the world.

They tried, props for the courage, but they fucked up.

I feel like lives lost is perhaps the better metric of success.

I am merely speculating here, maybe due to the situation, Swedes had generally been more careful than their neighbours (i.e. Denmark, Norway and Finland), because their situation remained worse and worsened for longer, and they might be seeing a downturn in cases a few months later than neighbouring countries. Again, just speculating, but I also feel vindicating their strategy at this stage is doing exactly the same.

They also have significantly more deaths per capita than all but 3 EU countries (Italy, Spain and Belgium.) That said, I definitely don't think a country's deaths per capita necessarily indicate doing something totally wrong. Belgium, for example, has the 2nd worst number of deaths per capita - literally ten times more than many other EU countries - but they weren't materially different than their neighbors in their strategy, and indeed seemed to lock down harder...

We also do a lot less less tests than our neighbouring countries. Denmark in particular is really good at getting testing done, which is also a reason why they are seeing a spike in their results the past few weeks.

When going deeper, there are 2 parameters that seem to correlate with the dead rates:

1) Sweden is lacking medical employees, therefore the medical education of the staff in these structures is very low. Also the geographical death distribution in the country is a big debate because some reasons could be "hot potato" topic

2) "replacebility" of the elderly: in luxury private structures, the death rate is very low because they protect the one paying the bill (so all the procedures are very strict). In public structures, the gov is paying the bill, and as soon as someone dies, it frees a bed for the next "customer".

My father in law was in a public structure in Sweden and died this year. For several years we saw horrible things: medical staff/procedures does not care about deadly "common" viruses.

You need to understand that Swedish culture is really unhealthy right now and I ask all of you - I plead to you - as a Swede, to please stop giving Swedish policy attention so we can, on our own, solve our problems and get back to some kind of normalcy and humbleness.

What has happened the past 30+ years and has become really problematic the past 10 years is that Sweden has this extremely unhealthy culture of believing in Swedish exceptionalism while at the same time craving attention from other nations, and promoting this belief socially. While the Swedish Corona strategy is not explicitly designed to be contrarian at the world stage (and therefor get a lot of attention), the way Swedish mono-culture works is that the people who implement policy (as well as many citizens) chauvinistically and subconsciously believe that Sweden is somehow superior to other nations and at the same time believe that Sweden (as an exceptional country) has something to teach inferior countries (i.e all other countries).

So where we are right now is that we have this unhealthy feedback loop where Sweden initially did it's own thing, and as it turned out to be different that has been a signal to policy makers that Sweden is right. Because Sweden is exceptional, so if the policy is different from inferior countries (i.e all other countries), it must be right.

I wish, probably more than anything else, that other countries would just stop giving Swedish policy makers this attention because then maybe, hopefully, our politicians can start to do what's right for our citizens instead of what gets attention and talking points at the world stage.

This is far broader than Corona: Sweden gets way too much attention overall, because Swedish politicians and government communication employees have nailed "marketing" more than anything else. They crave this attention and they manufacture policy to get attention, at the expense of the people who live in the country. Often under the guise of marketing Sweden as a "moral super power", superior to other nations.

So please, if you are for example a left leaning American, please don't use Sweden as a political piece. Don't give our politicians this attention. There are many other countries that deserve attention but they deserve attention because they do The Right Thing. Like Denmark. Not like Sweden that fucks things up but enjoy the attention it gets when doing so, citizens be damned.

[1]: https://twitter.com/yinonw/status/1295152579941249024

At the start of the pandemic Anders Tegnel, the architect of Sweden's response to the virus, did not believe that asymptomatic carriers existed [1], so Sweden's Public Health Agency instructed health workers in care homes to only stay at home if they had symptoms and to not wear any PPE at work [2]. So they carried the virus into the care homes and a hecatomb of old people ensued.

Obviously, now that the most vulnerable are gone, the virus kills many fewer patients. Swedes don't even need to have immunity to the virus, as such. They just need to be young and healthy enough to survive it if they get it. Not so much heard immunity, as herd culling.

For comparison, let's take Greece, where I'm from and which is a country with a similar population to that of Sweden (about 10 million each). Greece imposed a draconian lockdown in early March, as soon as the severity of the pandemic became obvious (we are right next to Italy, after all). The result was about ~2500 infections and ~140 dead by 1st July when the lockdown was lifted [3]. Remember, that's in a country with a similar population as Sweden (but with a much more touchy-feely, huggy-kissy, family-dinner Mediterrannean culture than Sweden). Now we've opened our borders and we're doing business (= tourism) as usual. Infections have also risen, but deaths are still very low, in the single or low double digits daily, so that about 300 people have died since the start of the pandemic. It's all pretty manageable and our health system is not overwhelmed.

We had a total lockdown, lost very few people, but we're back in action and deaths are low despite rising infections. And without letting our old and vulnerable die in their thousands. We lost 300, Sweden lost 6,000. If Sweden's approach was vindicated- Greece's approach was vindicated tenfold.

____________

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01098-x

There is a possibility that asymptomatics might be contagious, and some recent studies indicate that. But the amount of spread is probably fairly small compared to people who show symptoms.

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/19/anger-in-swede...

The agency’s advice to those managing and working at nursing homes, like its policy towards coronavirus in general, has been based on its judgment that the “spread from those without symptoms is responsible for a very limited share” of those who get infected.

Its advice to the care workers and nurses looking after older people such as Bondesson’s 69-year-old mother is that they should not wear protective masks or use other protective equipment unless they are dealing with a resident in the home they have reason to suspect is infected.

Otherwise the central protective measure in place is that staff should stay home if they detect any symptoms in themselves.

[3] https://epidemic-stats.com/coronavirus/greece