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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

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. Sources in English are harder to come by about this, but for example in spring when Stockholm's ICU beds were at full capacity it is implicit that people with better prognosis had to be prioritized. Seniors with severe cases of corona were instead given morphine and sent to die in care homes: https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/stockholm/skarp-kritik-efter-ivo-granskning-av-aldreboenden https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/stockholm/skarp-kritik-eft... Nothing like this happened in Sweden's neighboring countries with more cautious COVID approach because ICU beds so far never reached full capacity. In a modern Nordic welfare state denying a dying person of care that could save their life is not only a complete failure of the health care system but also a crisis of moral values. I am not sure the Swedish public is yet ready to even admit the latter crisis.

cjblomqvist 6y ago
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.
- vesinisa 6y ago
  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 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52704836
  - LeCow 6y ago
    You need to look up what the word "collapse" means. What you actually meant was "got a bit busier".
    - andrepd 6y ago
      Like the GP says, "overloaded to the point where treatable patients are given morphine and sent back to die" means "collapse" in my book.
      - CuriousSkeptic 6y ago
        There is an ongoing investigation of the COVID response. https://coronakommissionen.com/ https://coronakommissionen.com/ https://coronakommissionen.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/summary.pdf 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
        cjblomqvist 6y ago
        Thanks for providing sources! (which nobody else, me included, couldn't)
  - amluto 6y ago
    > 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.
polack 6y ago
Why is it that so many like you spread lies like this? Are you feeling depressed from being in quarantine for a year so you try motivate that it was the right thing by "proving" that things would have gone worse if you didn't? Or are you just trolling out of boredom?
- throwaway3699 6y ago
  I'm starting to feel exactly the way you are. I believe we're already at the point where most people don't care, the only thing keeping lockdowns going is the threat of arrest.
  - spaginal 6y ago
    Most people that promote lockdowns 9 months into this either already didn’t work, have made the same or more money during Covid at their current job, or don’t give a hoot about civil liberties and enjoy the fist of out of control government getting jammed up you know where. They don’t understand that they have invited the fox into the henhouse. This model of crisis response is going to be broadly applied in other situations after Covid is over, and they’ve given the government all the ammunition they need to apply it and enforce it.
    - throwaway3699 6y ago
      There's an aspect of class warfare here. When the lockdown started, I moved out of London and back home into a relatively poor area. Most people were in favour of it then, but today I do not know a single pro-lockdown person here that isn't: 1) a student with guaranteed income from their loans 2) a white-collar worker, usually senior 3) is somebody who is retired or has a lot of money I'm not somebody who advocates for breaking the lockdown, but I wish the people pushing for them need to realise there are real consequences beyond pure survival (like people being evicted or going hungry). Rishi Sunak seems to be the only person in government who seems to understand the economic devastation to follow and is openly worried about it.
      - 6y ago
kzrdude 6y ago
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.
- corin_ 6y ago
  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!)
koheripbal 6y ago
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.

cjblomqvist 6y ago

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.

vesinisa 6y ago
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 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52704836
- LeCow 6y ago
  You need to look up what the word "collapse" means. What you actually meant was "got a bit busier".
  - andrepd 6y ago
    Like the GP says, "overloaded to the point where treatable patients are given morphine and sent back to die" means "collapse" in my book.
    - CuriousSkeptic 6y ago
      There is an ongoing investigation of the COVID response. https://coronakommissionen.com/ https://coronakommissionen.com/ https://coronakommissionen.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/summary.pdf 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
      - cjblomqvist 6y ago
        Thanks for providing sources! (which nobody else, me included, couldn't)
- amluto 6y ago
  > 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.

polack 6y ago

Why is it that so many like you spread lies like this? Are you feeling depressed from being in quarantine for a year so you try motivate that it was the right thing by "proving" that things would have gone worse if you didn't? Or are you just trolling out of boredom?

throwaway3699 6y ago
I'm starting to feel exactly the way you are. I believe we're already at the point where most people don't care, the only thing keeping lockdowns going is the threat of arrest.
- spaginal 6y ago
  Most people that promote lockdowns 9 months into this either already didn’t work, have made the same or more money during Covid at their current job, or don’t give a hoot about civil liberties and enjoy the fist of out of control government getting jammed up you know where. They don’t understand that they have invited the fox into the henhouse. This model of crisis response is going to be broadly applied in other situations after Covid is over, and they’ve given the government all the ammunition they need to apply it and enforce it.
  - throwaway3699 6y ago
    There's an aspect of class warfare here. When the lockdown started, I moved out of London and back home into a relatively poor area. Most people were in favour of it then, but today I do not know a single pro-lockdown person here that isn't: 1) a student with guaranteed income from their loans 2) a white-collar worker, usually senior 3) is somebody who is retired or has a lot of money I'm not somebody who advocates for breaking the lockdown, but I wish the people pushing for them need to realise there are real consequences beyond pure survival (like people being evicted or going hungry). Rishi Sunak seems to be the only person in government who seems to understand the economic devastation to follow and is openly worried about it.
    - 6y ago

kzrdude 6y ago

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.

corin_ 6y ago
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!)

koheripbal 6y ago

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.