Swedish King Carl XVI Gustaf says coronavirus approach 'has failed'
bbc.com
bbc.com
Additionally, in Sweden, it is has become pretty recognisable by all that the Swedish approach has failed, but no one is willing to take the blame. The King effectively cuts through all this, and says the blame lies squarely with Prime Minister Stefan Löfven.
In political terms, I wonder how long Löfven's government will last.
I think the PM should take responsibility, so evidently say you, but unfortunately the King didn't say that.
And who is liable for the government in the end? Prime Minister Löfven. I think it's hard to read anything else between the lines here.
The king isn't an infections disease expert, but he's not an idiot, and he can get any experts he want to tell him what's going on. He's also the one person "in government" who can speak truth about the prime minister without fearing the prime minister's wrath. This lets the king be the one who can say what needs to be said when nobody else will say it.
Our PM also doesn't have the authority to tell our public health agency what to do, this amounts to ministerial governance, which is illegal [1]. (if the US would have such a law, for example, then we would have seen a lot less involvement of POTUS)
And re our king: he's (arguably) not an idiot, but he's not very bright either. We generally don't take his opinion seriously.
Same thing here. Doesn't matter there's others that could replace the king is his job.. he's the current one with that job, so we listen in a way that takes his position into account.
I would be surprised if the monarch retained greater independent personal authority as Queen of Canada.
Or we want to ignore success cases? Because neither the media or governance talks about it, don't even mention that are countries in economic recovery and they match countries that have the pandemic under control.
It's like living with the virus is bad for the economy.
I think a big part of it was public discourse, some faced this pandemic has a battle that must be won, others took it has an inconvenience. This second group, the majority, then went on to face issues like individual rights crises that resemble something like everyone is entitled to their RIGHTS, but somehow they forgot about DUTY and RESPONSABILITIES.
* China and other countries using state surveillance and privacy infringement to control the virus.
* New Zealand which is a pretty sparsely populated isolated island.
Australia - long lockdowns
Singapore - probably falls in with China on state surveillance and privacy infringement
Folks don't mask up and, also, do not keep the distance as required. Visit a supermarket, metro or restaurants (yes, restaurants are open!) and you won't see anyone using masks or distancing.
Anecdotally my wifes work place only started WFH recommendations once 6 people got infected. On industries such as software almost everyone I know has been WFH since February but many folks insist in going to the office.
On the beginning of the pandemic retirement homes were badly hit which would lead you to think the government would learn something. It did not happen and lots of places are being reinfected.
Recent news headlines to keep in mind:
-Gov is thinking in requesting private practice nurses to help with the load on public hospitals
-Talk of neighboring countries "sharing the burden"
-Elder care not well equipped to deal with this wave
-ICU occupancy reaching 99% in Stockholm
Remember Sweden was supposed to see 25x hospital overflow and 100,000+ excess deaths according to the models. Instead they have seen a basically normal year in which excess deaths might come in to about 2,000 to 3,000 by the time December is counted.
Meanwhile, lockdowns were meant to just last a few weeks to help ride out a temporary exceedance of hospital capacity. 9 months later people are still locked down with no end in sight, considering that many vaccines don't attempt to halt transmission. Meanwhile there are no correlations visible between severity of lockdown and healthcare outcomes. None. It is a 100% and total failure as a policy.
The media and international establishment types have been pumping out anti-Swedish propaganda for a long time now. You have to double check it carefully to notice it's false. For example, ICU capacity is extremely flexible. Sweden more than doubled it via a variety of mostly administrative means in the first wave and never ran out, even though in the first wave there were more hospitalisations than in the second. The occupancy figures that get thrown around are thus frequently meaningless because the denominator can change so fast. As for "thinking of requesting private nurses to help", is that meant to indicate a crisis? Why should anyone turn their lives upside down to avoid hospital managers having to do such trivial and basic things?
Meanwhile, lockdowns caused a significant fraction (nearly half) of all excess death in the UK in the first wave, and there's significant evidence that COVID is being significantly over-classified even on death certificates in the second wave. The economic destruction will undermine healthcare spending for years or even decades to come. The destruction of confidence in public health officials and 'scientists' is even more severe. It's a catastrophic policy that Sweden correctly ignored, and their reward is a basically normal year:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-...
And I'd rather take my chances if the alternative is perpetual stay at home orders (I'm from Argentina, we spent 9 months in strict lockdown).
At this point, even if the government asks for another lockdown, people are not going to listen.
It's absolute insanity to throw your country in the pit of perpetual isolation in order to "save everyone." You can't save everyone even if you home-jail 100% of the population. The virus will not magically disappear no matter what you do, especially when it's do contagious.
This guy is being a populist just like anyone else nowadays. Say and do whatever nets you more upvotes.
If it's out of control, it needs to be brought under control after which time incrementally more open measures can be taken.
https://www.ft.com/content/e66b2d2b-aa70-4866-a9cb-2cd095f4f...
That is the problem to solve, lockdown or not, in most countries we have utterly failed to protect our most vulnerable people. In fact I'd go as far as arguing that lockdowns and restrictions for the general population have diverted attention and effort from protecting the LTC homes & the vulnerable.
https://apnews.com/article/virus-outbreak-new-york-andrew-cu...
"March 25 order that sent thousands of recovering COVID-19 patients from hospitals into nursing homes at the height of the pandemic."
As an engineer, if you gave me this problem, I'd secure every LTC home with 24hr police / national guard. All staff would be do 3 weeks on, 3 off, but while "on" (think oil rig workers), living on-site in trailers or [hm]otels, not going home every night (movies do this when filming on location; juries get sequestered for important trials, why can't we do this here?). When staff go on-shift, they must be isolated and then tested before being allowed to go onsite. Deliveries left on the loading dock and properly sanitized, and no visitors -- AT ALL. For Medical emergencies (local FD / EMTs), the resident & 1st responders would have to be isolated for triage, then taken off-site and go back through quarantine / testing to get back in.
It's totally doable and the cost is a heck of a lot less than an economic shutdown / lockdown, or the continued high death toll.
They're better off than some countries with strict lockdowns like France, Italy etc
https://www.aier.org/article/swedens-dry-tinder-accounts-for...
Include that and you can find the reason for this supposed mystery: Sweden had an extremely low number of deaths in 2019 compared to its neighbours. They'd have regressed to the trend sooner or later anyway, whether it be via flu or natural attrition, but it ended up being COVID.
This comparison also assumes there are somehow great differences between European countries, that Sweden and France are as incomparable as Sweden and Saudi Arabia or India. Nobody ever presents an argument for why that is, so these "don't look at France or the UK, Sweden can only be compared to Norway" argumetns end up looking like motivated reasoning.
Swedish deaths are not going to be anything remarkable this year compared over the last 10 years. Probably 3-5% higher than the 10 year average, so a few thousand deaths, all of whom will have been very old. For a supposedly deadly pandemic that's pretty good.
That's an apples and oranges comparison. Sweden is far worse off than their neighbors, that are far more similar to it than France and Italy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/15/world/europe/sweden-coron...:
> Infection numbers and deaths have been rising steadily since October. By Tuesday, Sweden had reached a total of 320,098 cases since the beginning of the pandemic, while its neighbor Finland, with a population about half of Sweden’s, has 31,110 cases, less than 10 percent of Sweden’s.
> Sweden’s total death toll reached 7,667 as of Tuesday. The country now has 74 deaths per 100,000 people, less than the United Kingdom, with 97, but far more than its neighbor Norway, with seven.
They aren't doing any worse than Democrat-led states though, so no idea how you can say this.
Blue states were hit early on. Case numbers in red states caught up at the beginning of Aug, hospitalization numbers at the beginning of Oct.
I'd be interested in the cumulated death rate as of today (but not so much so to calculated it myself...)
[1] https://www.aei.org/economics/impact-of-the-coronavirus-pand...
It's worth keeping in mind that the BBC likes to play the journalistic game of "holding the government to account", which really means they will support a kind of response (lockdowns) tacitly while criticising the government for any piece of bad news (because they didn't lockdown / didn't lockdown fast enough / hard enough) while also engaging in the kind of general doom-mongering that does nothing to inform or educate. Like much of a UK media that shares its outlook, there's been nigh on 6 months of articles looking for any sign that Sweden's largely voluntary strategy will or has failed, as Spiked noted[0]… oh, 6 months ago in May, so it seems it's been longer than 6 months.
For a far more balanced view of Sweden's response, I recommend this article[1] in the Spectator. I suspect I'll have to wait another 6 months until the sun is back out for another of its ilk.
[0] https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/05/28/why-they-hate-swede...
To the point in the Spectator piece, though, it could easily be argued that the US is similarly incapable of imposing real lockdowns, for both legal and cultural reasons.
> it could easily be argued that the US is similarly incapable of imposing real lockdowns, for both legal and cultural reasons
Completely agree, but again, the media made their focus Trump instead of detailing the situation as it really is (which is not to ignore his input). That must not sell enough papers nowadays.
That would be the job of the head of government, i.e. PM Löfven in this case.
The main difference between a king and a president is that, with a president, if he/she is corrupt or incompetent you can remove it. With a monarch your are stuck for life.
In my opinion, the greatest virtue of democracy is not the power to choose who govern you, but the power to remove it from power peacefully. Historically that is pretty remarkable. Of course, in the case of Sweden, the king has a very limited power. The point is, it's not a random person.
(1) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_Minister_of_Sweden
I believe more could have been done, but solely blaming our prime minister is just irrational. For example, the local government in the three biggest regions, Skåne Stockholm and Västra Götaland, made the decision to cut down on the items in their pandemic storage area[3]. Guess what happened when nurses and doctors were asking for more supplies.
There are of course other instances where politicians prioritized money over health, which had a negative impact on people's lives, which covid-19 only made worse.
Also, it's my opinion that people in Sweden have largely ignored the restrictions. I base this on the fact that walking to the store to buy food, I'm the only one wearing a mask and trying to keep a distance. Friends and colleagues report the same. The fact that IKEA (where I live) was packed with people suggest that people don't care.
[1] https://www.regeringen.se/pressmeddelanden/2020/06/mats-meli...
[2] https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/coronakommissionen-missly...
[3] https://sverigesradio.se/sida/artikel.aspx?programid=83&arti...
My workplace only went full wfh fairly recently with the latest recommendations and still 2 weeks ago people were organising face to face meetings...
- The situation is bad, real bad, but no one publicly acknowledges that;
- The government, instead of taking unpopular and painful but needed steps to try and handle the problem, makes itself "don't see any problem, our people are happy";
- By all European standards the policy is a mistake, but no one in office steps forward and says so, they rather play to the tune of "we can't see any problem, public opinion of the government is quite high". Kinda of asking to play louder the band on the Titanic.
- Swedes keep on "trusting the government to do what they do as they know better", while it is unclear on what their trust is based.
- To outsiders, this attitude of all sides involved sort of means "we accepted 'the devil take the hindmost' philosophy as we want to keep our daily happy about routine unchanged, so be it". Again, as I said - typical thinking of USSR of 80s. It didn't end well.
This is based on the Swedish belief that they are the smartest people in the world and that everyone else is dumb therefore their government's plan must be good and every other world government is just being hysterical
"Sweden cannot legally declare a full state of emergency to deal with corona, says an expert in constitutional law - and right now Sweden can't declare a lockdown and confine people to their homes either, as has been done in Britain, France, Spain and other countries.
Tormod Otter Johansen is a researcher in public law at Gothenburg University, he says, however, that legislation introducing the possibility of wider lockdowns could be introduced very quickly, as the government has shown over the past few weeks with other legislation to deal with the effect of the coronavirus."
https://sverigesradio.se/artikel/7454661
So, it is possible to change the legislation to enable the goverment to call for lockdowns, but it needs some more steps than in other countries.
The current main criticism, thou, relates to eldery care: "Corona commission criticises government over elderly care" https://sverigesradio.se/avsnitt/1625475
The current recomendations can be found here: https://www.krisinformation.se/en/hazards-and-risks/disaster...
That is, if they have compliance rates that are comparable to the countries that do have legal recourse, do we have reason to think legal recourse would have gotten them better compliance?
For an example, I was driving through rural Alabama, which has a state wide mask mandate, and at every convivence store I stopped in, everyone was masked. Right next door in Georgia, which has the opposite of statewide mask mandate (the governor made local mandates illegal), almost no one was masking.
The same is true for my home county. There's a mask mandate--everyone wears a mask. Move one county over--no mandate and almost no masks.
They definitely have high numbers of covid. So does most everyone. :(
As of October--How often have you worn a face mask outside your home to protect yourself or others from coronavirus?
Sweden:
Always------- 4.3%
Not at all-- 76.7%
Spain:
Always------ 95.8%
Not at all-- 0.3%
I confess I have stopped driving on these numbers. Seems way more noise then signal. Death rates, for example, at a naive guidance look worse for Spain. Do you also have a good launch point to get caught up on analysts?
>Death rates, for example, at a naive guidance look worse for Spain.
Spain is about 4 times as densely populated as Sweden, you'd expect spread and death rates for a communicable disease to be higher.
My question on accuracy is more on how well we know the source. A scientific online passive poll is likely still pretty bad. Especially if taken from a partisan audience.
Also, just to emphasize. I don't see any obvious points. But that not includes agreeing with the approach Sweden took. I just don't understand much of the reporting focusing on the voluntary aspect without establishing that Sweden had bad compliance with mask wearing.
>without establishing that Sweden had bad compliance with mask wearing.
I think what you're seeing is that it's taken as a given because no one is claiming the opposite. Many of the people stating this live in Sweden, and it's obviously not hard to walk around in public and take notice of the fact that very few people are wearing masks
Here's a few articles with reports from people living in Sweden estimating that less than 10% of people wear masks in public [3,4].
[1] http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-08/22/c_139308631.htm [2] https://twitter.com/YouGov/status/1279755135892234241/photo/... [3] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/comment/sweden-really-lik... [4] https://www.aier.org/article/masks-in-sweden/
[1]https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/study-shows-which-res...
"while many of the available interventions work, mask mandates stand out for their effectiveness and relative lack of economic tradeoffs. “Mandatory mask policies seem to be as effective as policies that have higher costs,” says Tookes."
The article is saying that mandating masks has a positive impact, but recommending them does nothing.
Even here in the US, some mandates have gotten worse compliance than others.
Because I really do feel that systematically, it's not legal enforcement that is the issue.
99% of it seems to me would be workplace orders - if all governments spaces (aka public transit) require masks, and most corporations require public masks, then it's going to be hard to go to to many places without them.
Maybe however a lot of individual small restaurants and gyms would flaunt the rules, even under threat of shame, which is maybe understandable since the proprietors are facing basically collapse and losing their entire life's savings etc..