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Your source doesn't say the same thing you do (unless I'm missing something). The article talks about the problems at care homes. Aside from a few hospitals, we never maxed our ICU beds (AFAIK anyway). The "implicit" makes it really hard to argue without any source. Most likely you're referring to what I specifically brought up in my original comment. Some were not treated properly and sent home because of hysteria - not because of a national health care "collapse".

Did care homes in Sweden (which are separately organized from the rest of the health care system) manage COVID well? Probably not. Did some people panic and made they stupid decisions? Probably.

Did we dismantle some temporary ICUs without using them? Yes. Did we reach max ICU bed capacity in any region (the Swedish health care system is organized by regions)? Not that I know. Did we have a national health care collapse? Not as far as I can see. If we did, please provide sources.

Sure, you can say that ICU bed limit was never actually reached, because you prioritized.

From the very beginning of the epidemic it has been clear a person with serious case of corona would go to an ICU and put on a ventilator for the best treatment. Hospitals instead told care homes in Stockholm not to send seniors with severe corona in at all:

> Now, increasing numbers of workers are also coming forward to criticise regional healthcare authorities for protocols which they say discourage care home workers from sending residents into hospital [...]

> "They told us that we shouldn't send anyone to the hospital, even if they may be 65 and have many years to live. We were told not to send them in," says nurse who worked in several care homes around Gävle, north of Stockholm, at the beginning of the pandemic.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52704836

You need to look up what the word "collapse" means.

What you actually meant was "got a bit busier".

Like the GP says, "overloaded to the point where treatable patients are given morphine and sent back to die" means "collapse" in my book.

There is an ongoing investigation of the COVID response.

https://coronakommissionen.com/

https://coronakommissionen.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/su...

> The Health and Social Care Inspectorate has shown that there was a marked reduction in the number of referrals to hospitals from residential care facilities for the older people during February–June 2020. However, it is hard to establish whether this type of guidelines led to physicians failing to make individual assessments of care need

So I gather that even if the health care system was never overloaded, there might have been some confusion in the elderly care that led to mistakes.

But to the extent the elderly care system was “overloaded” this has been the case for decades. Not due due to the COVID response.

> We have found that elderly care was unprepared and ill-equipped when the pandemic struck and that this was founded in structural shortcomings that were known long before the outbreak of the virus. The ultimate responsibility for these shortcomings rests with the Government in power – and with the previous governments that also possessed this information

Thanks for providing sources! (which nobody else, me included, couldn't)

> From the very beginning of the epidemic it has been clear a person with serious case of corona would go to an ICU and put on a ventilator for the best treatment.

At the beginning of the pandemic, people thought this. As I understand it, it is actually preferable to keep patients off of ventilators as much as possible.

It is certainly not the case that, if you show up at a hospital and the hospital has unlimited resources, then you should be put on a ventilator because it’s somehow good for you.

I'm not sure I should wade into this, because I think swedish authorities need a lot of scrutiny and they have mismanaged the response, and refuse to accept accountability for this. I would direct this scrutiny towards the health authority and the political administration.

Anyway:

> I guess it all depends on your definition of "collapse". I would describe a situation where hospitals are overloaded to the point where they have to choose who gets to live and who has to die a collapse.

Triaging patients and prioritizing them is every day in a hospital, corona or not. If you talk with a Swedish doctor (I do, because that's the health service I use), they often think in terms of which medicines are cost-effective and for which group of patients they should be used (basically - what is the human basis for using this expensive medication on this particular patient). To make it concrete, maybe they will even tell you that you are a "priority" because you have a long working life ahead of you.

Medicine and care can be infinitely expensive and public health care is a finite resource. They always calibrate towards giving patients adequate care, not infinite care.

You're right, but there's a difference between "it's not worth spending millions on an operation to slightly improve an unimportant part of someone's little finger" and "I have two people who will die if I can't treat them, and due to limited staff/hospital space one of them isn't being sent for treatment".

So yes, it's not binary between normally being infinate and now not, but it's also a bit too reductive to make that point without also being clear that Covid has caused more and worse triaging than usual. (But someone needed to make your portion of that point and you did it much better than I could have, so thanks!)

I don't think semantic debates are very worthwhile, but in my mind a system that collapses is completely non-functional, not partially non-functional.

A system that is choosing which patients to treat is therefor not collapsed.

Similarly, a bridge that has collapsed transports zero traffic - not 50% of the traffic.

But again, venturing into these semantic debates isn't useful. People choose hyperbolic words in order to justify their preconceived conclusions. The hyperbolic adjectives themselves aren't the point of OP above.