Sweden no longer stands out in pandemic, says architect of ‘no lockdown’ policy
ft.com
ft.com
Whatever your stance on the merits of lockdowns, I think this is a question that very much needs asking and analysing objectively. Sadly I suspect that too many political careers are at stake across the board for the answer to this question to be answered objectively for a long time yet.
The vast majority of people have "picked a side" and will use any data they deem to be advantage to their side to highlight how they were right, and ignore any data that disproves their side.
This is true for both the "science" class and the political class.
"Trust the science" has become a "Trust the science that agrees with my worldview, ignore the rest"
For politicians that is expected for people that claim to be "scientists" that has become an alarming trend over the last 24 mos'
I find this statement, which we hear ad infinitum from every direction, to be indistigushable from "trust in god". This "Science" thing is the new faith.
They must be seen as ALWAYS doing something, anything, to solve every perceived problem. This is the root cause of most of the issues, Just once I would love to see a politician say "This is not for government to solve" ... Just once...
When people in media, or politicians say "Trust the science" they do not point to a piece of data, or research, they instead point to a person, often a high profile person, that we are to trust.
I trust data, not people.
What country are you from? Looking at how quickly the disappeared from Sweden (merged into grocery stores) I would not be very surprised if they are gone in your country too before whatever mask mandatory you have.
And so on. We are secure but… not enough!
Oh, and you're going to need a booster jab every six months, but stop asking questions.
I guess expect the truth to be somewhere in between. But (like proven with other far-right strategies) also don't expect it to be exactly mid-day.
Although I don't agree he is far right. He is right.
In any case, Björn Olsen is certainly an expert and his viewpoints are a healthy balance to what Tegnell says
Björn Olsen has held a consistent line throughout so he is worth listening to.
Says a lot of how malleable political discourse is, I guess.
I feel like the right wing in Sweden (conservatives) are the ones that are less likely to be liberal.
In the sense that the have opinions on how people behave.
For example when it comes to freedom of religion or sexuality or want to have opinions what should be considered real art and what is not etc.
I think this will be the high price that Sweden really will have to pay in the long run.
Time will tell.
Sweden 1478
Denmark 474
Finland 219
Norway 173
They're 3 to 8 times worse. They now do compare favorably to Portugal for example at 1796. When did Portugal have the huge spike in deaths that propelled it in front of Sweden? When it decided not to do lockdowns, even though the numbers were horrible, to "save Christmas". 13k people or 3/4 of the total COVID deaths in Portugal happened from that decision alone. That other places also made horrible decisions doesn't help justify Sweden's.
>Sweden had one of the lower excess mortality levels in Europe
Presumably, excess mortality includes the effects of overloaded hospitals, delayed medical care, lockdown-related depression, and undiagnosed COVID, which are hard to measure any other way, and which seem logically much higher under lockdown.
Looks like Sweden's (cumulative) excess mortality shot up at the beginning of the pandemic, and has since trended downwards, whereas other nordic countries have been fairly low but trending upwards.
We'll see how this plays out. Could be that Sweden simply killed off larger percentage of the old and frail at the start, who are now dying in other countries. Or maybe Swedish population got infected more, and now has stronger protection than other countries.
Sweden: 5.21%
Finland: 1.57%
Denmark: -0.09%
Norway: -0.85%
And you think these numbers somehow argue that Sweden "no longer stands out"? Or tells a more positive story than the covid death numbers at least?
Source (thanks tomp): https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
Data as of October 17th (the latest date that Sweden has data for).
Mortality for the five years prior: [1]
2015: 90 907
2016: 90 982
2017: 91 972
2018: 92 185
2019: 88 766
And 2020: 98 124
Had 2019 been in line with the previous years the excess mortality would have been noticeably less pronounced.
This does explain some (not all though) of the difference in excess mortality, especially the many elderly who died early on.
[1] https://www.scb.se/hitta-statistik/sverige-i-siffror/mannisk...
Here is the same graph of excess mortality with all 27 EU states included: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
Note how Sweden has the is the sixth lowest of all the countries in the graph.
https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/9jyxqt/gdp_per_cap...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_languages#/media/File...
Here in Switzerland, we had plenty of lockdowns, followed the scientific wisdom and so on, and we're at 1375 deaths per million.
The UK has shifted strategies around a bunch, but they have one of the highest vaccination rates, and have had multiple lockdowns, but are still at a very high 2119 deaths per million.
I'm not trying to say this or that approach is good or bad, and I'm happy we've had lockdowns here in Switzerland. I'm just saying that correlating the number of deaths with the implementation of lockdowns definitely does not fully explain what we've seen so far.
There are so many other factors, such as excess mortality, compliance with measures, psychological impacts on both mental and physical health, international travel, local variants, and a lot of factors we don't even know exist yet.
Another one we don’t even understand at all yet is genetic makeup of the population. We know that with other diseases there are genetic markers that increase of decrease susceptibility. There probably are here too but we don’t know what they are. Differences in distribution of those markers could totally confound studies.
The best comparisons right now are going to be within more genetically and demographically similar populations.
Here in Ohio we have seen that the vaccine is over 90% effective at preventing severe COVID and death but far less effective at simply stopping transmission. (Ohio has used the mRNA Pfizer/Moderna one almost exclusively.) But we already know it does not sterilize.
Not sure about masks and lockdowns. Have to look that up. There are even more confounders there like what masks are being used (N95 vs KN95 vs thin cloth junk) and uneven compliance that nobody is able to track.
https://mobile.twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1457438899580456...
The screenshot is from the NYTimes covid tracker.
The guess was that more people were inside in the south the summer when it was hot, and they were running air conditioning. Now that the South has more reasonable temperatures, people are spending more time outside. While the north is starting to get colder and people are spending more time inside. This also seems to apply to California which has relatively stable temperatures all year, so they haven't been hit by either spike yet. Though the part that doesn't fit in here is the northeast corridor is not being hit as hard. My only guess is they were the ones hit hardest when covid started, so maybe they won't get as big of a spike now.
I cannot find the original material that informed me, but I see there was a research effort last year, described at
https://bren.ucsb.edu/news/seasonal-uv-light-exposure-affect...
> The authors then used a dataset of meteorological conditions with daily resolution ... analyz[ing] how four variables — UV radiation, temperature, humidity and precipitation — correlated with the daily growth rate of COVID-19 cases ... [and] found evidence that a location’s UV exposure significantly affects COVID-19 transmission. A change in UV exposure by 1 standard deviation (roughly equal to the difference in UV between May and June in Los Angeles) reduced the growth rate of new cases by around 1 percentage point over the following two weeks
and a more recent one, described at
https://eos.org/research-spotlights/scientists-uncover-the-s...
> The seasonal values of ultraviolet (UV) radiation and ADC, however, were consistent with fluctuations in COVID-19 prevalence across all five countries
Cool!
Wonder if anyone has tried to figure out what part of that is related to the virus transmitting less efficiently in UV light (disinfecting effect) and what part is related to peoples skin producing vitamin D when exposed to sunlight?
Personally I have tried the Norwegian cod liver oil (yuck) to get my necessary vitamin D.
CA, OR, and WA have better rates than many places, and the North East is by far the most vaccinated area of the country.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/national/corona...
For OR, I understand that they had a warm summer and spiked this summer already and are trending down now.
https://usafacts.org/visualizations/coronavirus-covid-19-spr...
We have the worst vaccine coverage of western Europe.
The government didn't take the necessary measures in September/October last year which lead to thousands of unnecessary deaths.
Most schools have no mitigation in place, no CO2 meter, no filtering, no mask, no testing.
The largest political party (SVP/UDC) has systematically downplayed the pandemic.
Etc.
You're right, I hadn't realised this. Still, all countries in Western Europe are within ~10% of each other when it comes to the percentage of the population that's fully vaccinated.
More generally, I definitely don't think Switzerland's handling of the pandemic was perfect, but it currently seems to me that Switzerland did mostly follow the advice of the scientific community.
with covid its all been a bunch of speculation and shouting
Covid is even harder to measure. One Example: You shut down elementary schools to prevent kids from getting infected; how many were pushed back into broken homes from the only safe space they had? How many will have long-term pain from learning , nutrition, physical abuse, mental health?
Most policy can be reduced to "Better safe than sorry" which completely ignores the direct and indirect costs of any action.
We know that. Not exact numbers, but at least there are rough estimates. It's been an active area of research for quite some time, so there's a lot of data. Statistically speaking, we know how childhood poverty or a missed school year means for average lifespan.
It's been theoreticized that a reason for the differences in pandemic response when it comes to Sweden are down to the fact that they recently unified all their people health issues, that is not only medical issues but also social ones, under one government agency. That broader mandate is generally more data driven and needs to take longer term effects of missing school into account.
> Most policy can be reduced to "Better safe than sorry"
That's not all there is to it. Strictly following that reasoning would emphasize known risks against unknown risks. That does not explain the policy making that dominated during the pandemic.
Kids, and many people for that matter, cannot just stay in lockdown for months like domestic cats without triggering mental health issues.
Without that, they seem pretty lazy, or designed to drive a political point regardless of the evidence.
This goes the other way too, of course - people who are keen to compare Sweden to the UK instead of Denmark cry foul whenever New Zealand is brought up.
The problem though is that there’s no bulletproof explanation for why lockdowns were so effective in the rest of Scandinavia and less so elsewhere in Europe (or many American states for that matter). Without that, the counterfactual is still a bit of a question mark. If Sweden had adopted Denmark’s strategy, maybe they would’ve indeed come out looking like Denmark - or maybe they would’ve come out looking like the UK. Vaguely gesturing towards “they’re all Scandinavian” doesn’t have much explanatory power.
Sweden is much more like UK, the Netherlands and Germany than it is like Norway or Finland when we look at things like urbanisation, demographic diversity and immigration. In part because much more of the population is centralized to a few areas. The organization of public health care, especially that of old people's homes, is completely different between those countries.
If we look at the regional differences, you'd see that the areas of Sweden which demographically is similar to Norway indeed followed the pandemic outbreak of Norway very closely, with a very low incidence for the longest time, and then scattered outbreaks with increasing magnitude.
During those first crucial months, the pandemic outbreak in Sweden almost exlusively took place in the two most populous and urbanized areas. The rest of the country was pretty much spared. With the differently implemented lockdown in place, it was interesting to compare incidence in smaller geographic areas separated by the border but otherwise much more similar than the countries are. It is quite clear that any correlation can not be substantiated by data.
Another reason why such comparisons are hard: UK aggressively cleared hospitals in early 2020, in anticipation of case rises, and discharged whoever they could home.
This lead to thousands of old people being discharged to care homes, as it turns out frequently with Covid, with care home staff having not even the basic protective gear. IIRC 25% of first wave deaths were attributed to care homes, and due to various quirks of the number, this may well be an underestimate.
I guess you’ll see other cases where the general policy was good/bad but external forces skewed the result.
Poland do basically no protective steps until Autumn 2020, and despite that was totally spared the pandemic. Then later shit hit the fan pretty badly...
In addition, anyone who died, for any reason, at any time after a positive test, was recorded as a covid death. Even if they died in a car accident months after they had the test.
Sources:
Covid-19: The problems with case counting:
"What is a case? One issue in trying to interpret numbers of detected cases is that there is no set definition of a case. At the moment it seems that a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) positive result is the only criterion required for a case to be recognised. In any other disease we would have a clearly defined specification that would usually involve signs, symptoms, and a test result, .... “We are moving into a biotech world where the norms of clinical reasoning are going out of the window. A PCR test does not equal covid-19; it should not, but in some definitions it does." http://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3374.full
Why no one can ever recover from COVID-19 in England:
"A Department of Health and Social Care source said: ‘You could have been tested positive in February, have no symptoms, then hit by a bus in July and you’d be recorded as a COVID death.’” https://web.archive.org/web/20201012190837/https://www.cebm....
And my favourite... Sir Humphrey responds to the allegation of test inaccuracy...
"Positive test results at the limit of detection that occur late in the cycle of infection represent individuals with a low or very low risk of transmission, as a result of the decline in infectious virus production or remnants of viral RNA in respiratory secretions. The clinical significance of these positive results, at the limit of detection of the assay, are difficult to interpret in the absence of a clinical history and context. Possible reasons for the non-repeatability of these results include stochastic effects at the limit of detection of the assay, true prolonged low level detection of the virus, and very rarely, analytical errors in sample handling." https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/sars-cov-2-rna-te...
What qualifies as “so many excess deaths”? The Hong Kong flu was per capita comparable to what we have now and most people didn’t know anything was happening.
The idea that COVID and the Hong Kong flu were comparable is, at this point, outdated. For instance, the most liberal estimate (per Wikipedia) of HKF deaths is around 100k in the US. Adjusting for population growth you’d see something like 175k dead (the US population was 200M at the time). The US is now at ~800,000 excess deaths since the start of the pandemic, and rising.
However tempting it may be to correlate only with the magnitude of the lockdown procedures, however, it is equally if not more important to correlate them with how public health is organized and what kind of service citizens could be expected to receive.
We can only hope that in time people will look back at this with a scientific mindset and draw any conclusions from that.
What about "whether people observe care or not"? Because I have seen (also not far away from the poster, and not even in a single "culture") that a large amount of people seemed to be completely oblivious and irresponsible - and I am very sure that factor has been and is being critical. Extreme lack of contextual awareness - in general and in specific occasions, day by day and moment by moment.
Incidentally: never received so many invitations to "go out and meet and do" like in the past two years. (And of course, never been so glad of cheap communication tech being available.)
Attention is everything.
You can compare the number of days of lockdown to deaths per million. You should also compare at what point of time the lockdowns were undertaken. There's plenty of research that shows Non Pharmaceutical Initiatives are very effective in stopping the spread of virus.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covi...
In terms of saving lives, it clearly wasn't the best strategy. In terms of securing a reasonable standard of living, keeping the economy going, keeping mental health effects limited, it was reasonably measured.
Bodies weren't piling up in the streets.
In my wider circle of acquaintances, I know of exactly two people who got sick during the pandemic. Maybe a few more did but didn't tell anyone, but it wasn't anywhere near the apocalyptic tales you see on the Internet, especially from people who haven't even been to the country.
In the Netherlands less than one thousand patients on the ICU is able to bring a healthcare system to a grinding halt.
Have a look here (tone is satirical) for a comparison of Sweden's and Germany's graphs:
https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2021/11/12/wear-a-mask-and...
Germany's numbers are exploding right now. In the U.S. you could also compare New York and Vermont. New York was more like Sweden (not by choice, but through incompetence and extreme population density). Vermont had the officially recommended policies and was a poster child.
Now the Vermont numbers are exploding, while New York's are not.
There is something to be said for the theory that the highly connected nodes in the social graph (who are often very healthy) all need to be infected in a short period. Then the outbreaks stop (like they have always done with the flu).
And this is very important.
Context is king, no more so than large scale and complex statistical analyses. Sadly almost nobody seems to appreciate this as long as they have a number to argue a point.
Nobody corrects for population demographics. Population density. The various interventions which will pollute the study even further as some have proven damaging. Not to mention the large scale all cause mortality spike associated with the vaccine drive observed as predicted in each further country from watching the Israeli data.
Ignoring all of the above in your statistical analysis is both cherry picking and employing the same logic used by people to exclaim 5G definitely causes cancer because of study-X where a rat died that one time.
That alone is probably one of the reasons the above data is now declared in the interests of nation states rather than being openly shared data. Only a few years ago we were making headway in data like this being made publicly available in it's entirety through equivalent to the English ONS. But this is now very inconvenient and frankly some of the data has been deemed "does not exist" so it can't be requested under FOI laws in the UK, despite the infrastructure still being in place and working in collection of this data.
I'm not crying conspiracy I'm just making a statement that lack of transparency sucks the big one when it comes to public policy.
Let’s revisit this in a decade when folks can add up deaths from Covid (and delayed care for other issues), mental health and economic impact.
THAT will be interesting to see.
Why calculate density of Sweden based on the total country when most people live in a couple cities? That’s just lying. It’s like calculating Canada’s density over the Arctic when 80% live within 100 miles of the US border.
And is my statistics about suicides wrong? 2020 was the highest since 2012?
Even if you want to compare by Sweden's most dense region, it's still 282/km2 versus 8,358/km2. Your comparison makes no sense whatsoever.
> And is my statistics about suicides wrong? 2020 was the highest since 2012?
You weren't making some generalized point about suicides increasing (which would have been irrelevant to the conversation at hand), you were trying to imply that lockdowns were directly responsible for the increase, which the statistical trend refutes.
Your commentary is intentionally disinformative.
” Population density is concentrated within Stockholm including its immediately surrounding urban area, averaging 11,802 people per square mile (4,279 per square kilometer).”
Clearly I’m the one spreading disinformation. Looking at city to city (Singapore is a city state) the density differences are minor.
And in in terms of suicides they were up 13% in one year. Singapore seems to think the covid situation was a factor.
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/suicide-highest-re...
Not sure kind of games you’re playing here.
In regards to the suicides, you just referenced an individual's personal thoughts on a potential reason for part of the increase. That's not evidence of anything, especially given that the statistical trend was already rising sharply upward, meaning there were existing issues being exacerbated long before COVID showed up. Even if we pretend that 100% of the 52 additional suicides in 2020 (a death rate of 12.6/mil) were directly caused by lockdowns, that's still a small fraction of the number of COVID deaths resulting from not having lockdowns, as is evidenced by ANY country's statistics.
So, yeah, you are ignoring all of the obvious facts that refute your assertions, which makes you disinformative.
Come on man. Just admit you were wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singapore
Total area: 728.6 km2
Density: 7,804/km2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm
Urban area: 381.63 km2
Urban density: 4,200/km2
Metro area: 6,519 km2
Metro density: 370/km2
My point was nothing more than the density is not that different, and your numbers show that.
The entire point I was making was that despite a very strict lockdown, Singapore is seeing really significant case numbers and deaths and they still aren't through it yet. All of those things are true.
Once the total costs of lockdown are fully tallied, we may find out the return on those restrictions weren't as high as we thought they would be.
That's not the point you were making at all and you know it, so now you're just further gaslighting -- and you haven't been remotely correct about any of it.
Let's recap.
> Maybe better to compare to Singapore which had ~6 deaths per million earlier this year, has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world but since barely relaxing their restrictions now has ~120 deaths per million, raging number of cases (mostly vaccinated) and had the highest level of suicides last year since 2012?
You wanted to compare Sweden to Singapore, but got called out for making a poor comparison given the drastic differences in population density. You also suggested that suicide rates increased because of lockdowns, without any evidence for that whatsoever, while also baselessly suggesting that more people died from lockdowns than would have from COVID, which is just completely false by every metric.
> Why calculate density of Sweden based on the total country when most people live in a couple cities?
Your response was to immediately move the goal post and limit the comparison to Sweden's most populated areas, while also making another false claim that "most" Swedes live in two cities, despite >65% of Swedes NOT living in those two cities. I played along with your trolling and explained why that's still a completely irrelevant comparison.
> Looking at city to city (Singapore is a city state) the density differences are minor. [...] And in in terms of suicides they were up 13% in one year.
Your response was to move the goal post AGAIN, to now strictly include the densest part of urban Stockholm itself. Unfortunately, even the densest part of Sweden's densest city isn't remotely similar to Singapore, especially given that the densest of Singapore's subzones have 45,000/km2, which is nearly 10x that of Stockholm's densest city center.
You also tried to use one person's musings as evidence that suicides were directly tied to lockdowns, even though the person didn't even claim that connection -- and at this point, you're still trying to insist that Singapore's "lockdown-induced" suicide rate increase is higher than Sweden's non-lockdown COVID death rate.
> Wow! You sure back down quickly. You originally said we should use Sweden's 25 people/sq km and now you're willing to concede that in reality it's half? And sorry, but Singapore and Stockholm have the same population density in terms of order of magnitude.
Here's where your trolling becomes egregious, because despite your decision to repeatedly put new, unfair and illogical restrictions on the comparison, you've now claimed that I was the one who changed the parameters. In reality, all I did was prove you wrong no matter how many times YOU decided to change the rules. In a last ditch effort to pretend your arguments have any footing, you also made a new claim that 4,000 is the same as 8,000 because they have the same number of digits, which is beyond absurd.
You also conveniently dropped your suicide rate argument at this point, because you ran out of manufactured and personally theorized "evidence."
> Half the density is "not even comparable"? You're not even arguing in good faith. You've just been proven wrong and now you're moving the goalposts and trying again.
You're now claiming that 50% is similar to 100%, which again, is beyond absurd. At this point, you've also completely misdirected away from the actual comparison between Singapore and Sweden being drastically lower than half, which is the case even for Stockholm alone when you more appropriately include the metropolitan area. You also repeated your claim that I moved the goal posts, which we've already established was your decision and not mine.
To summarize, you made two nonsensical claims in defense of 15,000 people dying, then moved the goal post, then moved it again, then moved it again while also inventing new word definitions. Then when you ran out of excuses for making such ridiculous claims and couldn't find any evidence to back them up, you started trollishly claiming that I was the one who decided to change the comparison.
By all means, explain how I'm the one gaslighting.
Since you've never tried to engage with those points I'm left to assume that you do not care about truth, and are only mis-using suicide stats to dishonestly make a point. That's pretty repellent behaviour.
Do better.
With reference to the countries that went to look for hermits in the deserts to tell them they should lock themselves somewhere to comply to the policy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...
I don't really see why people talk so much about covid when you can get way more health benefits just by limiting the hours you can buy alcohol on or similar, compared to limiting the movement of an entire population.
And next year as people got vaccinated the one year covid caused drop of 0.5 years will disappear and Sweden will be even better, while the huge push for covid measures didn't have any lasting impact. Imagine how many lives could be saved if the same amount of political will and resources were spent on more important things...
> One older overview of systematic reviews found that reducing hours of sale resulted in averting 250 to 750 Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALY) per one million population (8)
> One older systematic review and a recent rapid synthesis found an association between hours of sale of alcohol and increases in alcohol-related harms, including drinking and driving and road accidents, but the association was less clear for the effects on alcohol consumption or health harms
> Two older reviews found significant increases in alcohol-related motor casualties and assaults with increased temporal availability
https://www.mcmasterforum.org/docs/default-source/product-do...
750 DALY per 1 million is 0.00075 years per person by the way. That's basically negligible.
I don't really understand what happened in the last year?
We got the vaccines at the beginning but why no new vaccines? Why no lifelong protection vaccines? Where are all of the incentives to accelerate the r&d of new ways to handle this?
I mean, the current wave is worse than the worst and the strategies are still pure incompetence.
Is everyone just faking competence currently?
Start paying handsomely and maybe competent people will become interested.
On top of earnings, there is also the issue of unreasonable demand. Did you know for example that some government agencies can not use productive software because of stupid policies imposed by incompetent regulating bodies?
And worse still, a lot of the cases in Sweden earlier doors were brought back by holidayers in Spain, a popular Swedish holiday location apparently, which is exactly what happened to the UK too.
Is it a popular Finnish holiday location? Norwegian? Do those countries even have flights to Spain?
Answers I dont know, do you?
There's two sides to every story. Instead you might ask why don't they have a higher death rate than the UK or France or Italy, all of whom locked down.
Just another data point.
New York 2920
Vermont 620
They are 5 times worse! New York's decision to have a more urban population is completely unjustifiable.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covi...
I’m honestly surprised people still exist who support lockdowns.
18 months of relentless one-sided fear porn will do that to a mind.
I highly recommend Laura Dodsworth's recent book A State of Fear for more on this. It's about the UK but I'm sure a similar story could be told about most Western countries.
We need to answer three major question. 1: Malmö has the same lock down rules as the rest of Sweden, so why are the numbers so low compared to Copenhagen. 2: Why does Stockholm and the surrounding area have so high rate that it brings up the national average to be 3 times higher then Denmark? Finally 3: How does the lock downs relate to those two questions.
Finland made a smart move in the beginning of the pandemic. They locked down the capital with restricted movement in and out, keeping the initial spread low.
As I see it, Sweden made three mistakes. They should have locked down Stockholm. They should also have closed down the only subway Sweden has, located in Stockholm. They should have isolated the elder care workers who lived in Stockholm, many who used the subway system to reach the elder care homes going from elder care homes to elder care homes. Last they should have injected funds and medical supplies to the privatized elder care system, as many workers didn't even get enough time to wash their hands between patients.
An overall comparison with Scotland as a country which took drastic measures shows that it fared very badly with much greater excess death together with the many long-lasting knock-on effects of lockdown. Death rates as of Nov 2021 as % of the population are 0.216 (Scotland) versus 0.147 (Sweden).
The prime minister has stepped down and left the reigns to someone else this week. The responsible for the health authorities has started his pension a week or two ago. Both conveniently around the same time that the Swedish investigative COVID commission has released a scathing report on the handling of the epidemic.
The state epidemiologist, Dr. Tengele, sorry, Dr. Tegnell, is still there but currently in full-on "blame others"-mode, as long as the buck doesn't stop with him. It's the regions, or the elder care facilities, or the immigrants, or anyone as long as it isn't him.
It's makes for a immensely sad and sorry sight, but not unexpected in a country with no opposition voices, neither in politics nor media. But that's nothing new under the sun as it was already known in 1971, and nothing has changed since. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Totalitarians
Additionally, Sweden has changed it's guidance since last week so people that have been vaccinated twice should no longer get COVID tests, so please take any and all official numbers with a serious grain of salt and consider them as 'absolute minimum' values
Regarding the guy responsible for the health authorities. He looks quite old so it makes sense for him to retire, especially after a significant very special "project" is "done". Tegnell's wife (who's also been a public face during the pandemic) is taking over. Doesn't look too me like they're trying to start over.
No opposition: Really? There's been plenty in the news about the handling of the pandemic. TNT seems completely out of touch with reality. Could there be an alternative explanation why there's no uprising? Maybe people in Sweden in general isn't super dissatisfied (in general) with the outcome? I think it's clear even just from this thread that the view on how Sweden had handled the situation is mixed/unclear.
As for your last statement. There's a lot of difference in quality in the numbers from all countries more or less.
I'm a Swede with a relative who worked at "Folkhälsomyndigheten" during the pandemic who have also heard from other sources how these numbers/stats are collected in various countries.
PS. I'm not saying Swedens strategy was right or wrong. I'd say we need to wait and see what actual science has to say after we're all done with this. Instead of seeing random things as signs and thinking it's all a conspiracy.
Do you honestly expect anyone to take you seriously when you compare someone to a Nazi war criminal?