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Comment by cjblomqvist | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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