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Sweden bans public events of more than eight people
- brianbreslin 6y agoI haven't been following the news in Sweden in a few months, but am curious, did they keep up with the herd immunity plan or did they reverse course?
- bpodgursky 6y agoThe overarching goal has never been herd immunity. Sweden has always, and is continuing to pursue, sustainable social distancing and curve flattening. They have never significantly changed that course.
- Grustaf 6y agoExactly. And they have always been at war with Eurasia.
- yxhuvud 6y agoWell, Russia IS the traditional enemy of Sweden.
- dredmorbius 6y agoTrivium: Rus itself seems to have been the Finnish name for Sweden, meaning "land of rowing" (as in boats), carried by Swedes to Kiev in the 9th century. Long history. https://www.etymonline.com/word/Russia https://www.etymonline.com/word/Russia
- ceejayoz 6y agohttps://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/17/swedens-covid-19-strategist-under-fire-over-herd-immunity-emails https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/17/swedens-covid-... > However, email exchanges obtained by Swedish journalists under freedom of information laws show Tegnell discussing herd immunity as an objective in mid-March, days after the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic.
- Xevi 6y agoThat discussion was in an email conversation with, among others, Finland, where they stated that they've had the same thoughts about herd immunity. All countries have discussed herd immunity at some point. However, herd immunity was never the goal, as you can read from the email exchanges in the original source the article links to. It was merely a discussion about a possible side effect of the actual goals, which was to prevent a collapse of the Swedish healthcare system, and to prevent side effects that lockdowns have (because they're not a silver bullet either). Now, if they were successful is another question. I'm a Swede and I do not agree with our strategy.
- pc86 6y agoThis is just not true. Edit: To the downvoters, see sibling comments. Just because it doesn't fit whatever narrative you want to have doesn't change the facts.
- mrkeen 6y agoFor a country-wide strategy I think you need to do a bit better than digging discussions out of a guy's email. If herd immunity was the plan, then when was Tegnell going to let us co-conspirators in on it?
- polemic 6y agoThis is getting down-voted but it is something of a myth that Sweden ever had herd immunity as an officially adopted policy. Yes it was discussed at high levels but it is not true to say this was the strategy adopted and implemented by the government. This is not a defense of the strategy they did follow, which appears to have failed badly. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53498133 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53498133 > Sweden's authorities never said achieving herd immunity was their goal, but they did argue that by keeping more of society open, Swedes would be more likely to develop a resistance to Covid-19. https://www.politico.eu/article/sweden-coronavirus-didnt-seek-herd-immunity-torbjorn-sohlstrom/ https://www.politico.eu/article/sweden-coronavirus-didnt-see... > Speaking to Times radio on Sunday, Torbjörn Sohlström said that Sweden’s maverick no-lockdown coronavirus response did not seek to boost the number of infections and reach a critical mass of infected to stop the virus from spreading. etc. (It might help to consider what a "herd immunity" strategy would actually look like, vs the extremely light touch they actually took.) Final edit: this was a good look at the handling from a NZ journalist talking to a Swedish researcher from Lund University who looked at the international media coverage. Worth a listen if you want to understand how the "Sweden herd immunity" meme spread https://www.rnz.co.nz/programmes/the-detail/story/2018769007/how-has-sweden-really-tackled-the-covid-pandemic https://www.rnz.co.nz/programmes/the-detail/story/2018769007... _and_ how that's hiding some of the negative aspects of the Swedish approach you might not have heard about.
- brnt 6y agoIt's a feature present in all anglosaxon jurisdiction: nothing can be discussed in terms other than their political implications. Discussing the validity of the herd immunity argument is equivalent to considering a sort of genocide, and cannot be an honest and sincere discussion of a scientific theory. Fortunately Swedish gov didn't see much merit in the argument, as there isn't. It's good to know some jurisdictions haven't lost the ability to discuss things on scientific merits just yet.
- tpmx 6y agoQuick summary: Monumental incompetency/groupthink at our small CDC-equivalency (Folkhälsomyndigheten) during the spring. Disaster was narrowly avoided by heroic work by healthcare workers/hospitals. A lot of people died though. Death per capita levels are similar to US levels, not to rest-of-Nordics levels (e.g. Norway/Denmark/Finland). This isn't acceptable. Herd immunity was the obvious plan all along although it was publicly denied. Recent "leaked" emails have revealed the truth. The same people responsible for the above are still in charge. It will be a long winter. Source: Jag är svensk. (I am Swedish.)
- landemva 6y agoIt is useful to look at death rates by age group. Sweden initially made the same mistake as Cuomo in New York by putting known infected people in nursing homes that housed compromised older people. That caused it to spread into and kill a known vulnerable age group.
- _Microft 6y agoI just made up a word: would "folkhälsoomyndigheten" be a pun that Swedes would actually understand? My swedish is admittedly a bit rusty by now. Take care and all the best!
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- tinus_hn 6y agoThey sure are careful not to show the graphs on how many people actually end up in hospital! Can’t wait for all the self congratulatory articles about how Sweden was wrong all along.
- maxekman 6y agoWe have daily updated stats for everything related to Covid-19 in most major Swedish news sites like dn.se and svt.se.
- URfejk 6y agotwitter.com/JamesElijahMill/status/1327234821513482241
- sxp 6y ago91-DIVOC has useful charts: http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countries-normalized&highlight=United%20States&show=50&y=both&scale=log&data=deaths-daily-7&data-source=jhu&xaxis=right&extra=Sweden%2CEuropean%20Union#countries-normalized http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countri... Sweden's daily mortality rate is .2 vs the US at .3 and EU at .6. All of them have a daily case rate of around 40.
- addicted 6y agoNow let’s compare them to their comparable neighbors. I’ll make it easier. The only comparable neighbor who is actually close to them is Denmark. The others are an order of magnitude better. Also, Sweden’s economy dropped even more than its comparable neighbors’ economies.
- URfejk 6y agohttps://fee.org/articles/how-finland-and-norway-proved-sweden-s-approach-to-covid-19-works/ https://fee.org/articles/how-finland-and-norway-proved-swede...
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- codeulike 6y agoOk this is interesting. Any discussion of Sweden on here and certain other sites seemed to get a bit politicised - I think because its become a Dem/Rep battle topic in the USA. But up to a few weeks ago, it seemed that Sweden's policy of not introducing any measures that weren't long-term sustainable had worked kindof ok. It certainly hadn't been a complete disaster. People will point out that Sweden did worse than its immediate neighbours who locked down more. But Sweden also did better than places like the UK and USA who locked down more. There are probably many factors to that (e.g. Sweden has a high proportion of people who live on their own etc). But the Sweden data (until a few weeks ago) did point to the idea that some sort of herd immunity might be achievable, perhaps due to latent T-cell immunity from other coronaviruses. Not conclusively, but it was an interesting data point to discuss if anyone was able to keep an open mind about it. (Side note : and here's the important point for people involved in the Dem/Rep battle over Sweden - if Sweden was having success with their covid policy, that success could only have been understood in the context of Sweden’s highly developed welfare state and social system: universal healthcare, paid sick leave, paid leave to care for sick kids, subsidized daycare & pre/after-school care. The USA barely has any of those things.) Anyway if you read the linked article, there's a graph halfway down showing a massive second wave in Sweden, much bigger than the first, and so now they are having to lock down more. But hopefully its all moot now anyway becasue we have multiple vaccine candidates on the way. edit: yes of course vaccine distribution is going to take some time
- bobthepanda 6y agothere's still the issue of distribution of said vaccine, which may take a while; aren't most of the vaccines trialed requiring multiple shots as well?
- smnrchrds 6y agoI remember people praising Sweden's strategy for one important reason: they can do it indefinitely, while more stringent lock-down measures will fail because people will get tired of them and ignore the measures. It made perfect sense. By all indications, Sweden should have enjoyed a flat and sustainable level of infections. While this level may have been higher than neighbouring countries, the fact that it would have remained constant while other countries' would have surged as governments loosened restrictions and people stopped paying attention to them meant that Sweden's was the winning strategy for a pandemic that would be with us for several years. Why did this not pan out? Why is Sweden seeing a second wave as well? Why did the number of infections soar, while it should theoretically have remained constant?
- pchristensen 6y agoExponential growth can get out of hand very quickly. It doesn't take too many people to mess up, break rules, or get unlucky for this virus to erupt. Also, way more people are indoors in November in Sweden than August. Many people travel to remote cabins in the summer - August in Stockholm is about as deserted as San Francisco during Burning Man. They're mostly back by September, bringing more people in proximity. I'm in Seattle and Washington is locking down again, as colder temps have brought the long predicted fall spike.
- landemva 6y ago"the long predicted fall spike." If those in power knew a Fall spike would likely occur, would it have made sense to encourage healthy people to seroconvert during the summer, when the flu is less prevalent? Instead, this was purposefully stretched into the flu season. Why? Who benefits from fear and lockdowns?
- im3w1l 6y ago> Why? Well one part is incompetence. And the other is that a fall spike was just a hypothesis. We didn't know for sure.
- johnnycerberus 6y agoI don't know what is this strong focus on Sweden, they are just 10 million people with a small population density spread all over the Scandinavian peninsula. There were some herd immunity fans discussing on the Turkish TV about Sweden and how their model can be applied to Istanbul but they forget that Sweden has only 2/3 of the total population of just one city of Turkey. Apples with oranges. Like in programming, some people don't get the scaling right.
- nradov 6y agoPopulation densities are irrelevant at national scales. Most of Sweden is uninhabited wilderness, whereas most Swedes live in urban areas just like every other comparable country. Population densities only start to matter when comparing smaller regions.
- carlhjerpe 6y agoThe average swedish city is a lot smaller than the average city is mostly anywhere else, I do believe this matters.
- nradov 6y agoThere's no reason to believe that city size really matters. Density, housing patterns, and movement patterns are what count in the rate of spread.
- mythrwy 6y agoNow there is an effective vaccine the restrictions won't be indefinite, and the whole "herd immunity the sooner the better" argument is moot. I don't see it as Sweden giving it's previous position so much as reacting rationally to new circumstances.
- JackFr 6y agoDespite their best efforts and intentions, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the public health officials have little idea how to combat the spread of coronavirus. Today’s WSJ article had public health contact tracers unable to determine the source of 50-70% of new infections. Obviously strict isolation works. Wearing masks And avoiding large enclosed gatherings are common sense and almost certainly help. But beyond that, there isn’t any evidence based plan. There is guessing and post-hoc just-so stories. The idea that the public is to blame and if we had only “followed the science” we’d have it beat by now is weirdly moralizing nonsense.