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Regarding the "lack of information for those caring for the elderly", that sounds fairly implausible, because information about the epidemic has been abundant.

Regarding the "lack of information for those caring for the elderly", that sounds fairly implausible, because information about the epidemic has been abundant. The proportion of old people among the dead is not much different in Sweden from other comparable countries; it seems to me that any strategy with "protect the elderly and let the younger people take the hit" is doomed to fail. The more infections there are in the general population, the more infections there will be among the old and weak. And of course even the young and fit will also have a proportion among them who get seriously ill.

catears 6y ago
Maybe I should make it clear I don't defend the strategy. I'm not an expert and honestly I don't know what the best national strategy for protecting against a pandemic is. Regarding the lack of information for the elderly care tough, I know Anders Tegnell (who was the spokesperson for FHM during most press conferences) have said in several interviews that he regards that as a failure on FHMs part. They believed that stressing that the elderly were the most vulnerable would be enough, but says that this was probably a mistake.
addicted 6y ago
The Swedes have been misleading so much on this whole issue it’s hilarious. First, Tegnell refused to believe in asymptomatic transmission. Then he lied that herd immunity was never considered but we have emails from him to the broader scandinavian health directors saying that they should consider herd immunity through natural infection. Then they insist that the only reason Sweden looks so bad is because of care homes (which, btw, is greatly affected by the fact that Tegnell didn’t believe in asymptomatic transmission well after every health department was officially basing policy on it). Well, care homes amounted to about 50% of Swedish deaths. So even if you completely excused Swedish care home deaths, while doing no such thing for its neighbors, it still had a death rate that was 2.5x that of Denmark and even worse compared to its other neighbors. So if we count Danish care home and old people deaths, but don’t count Swedish care home deaths, Sweden is still 2.5x worse in terms of death rates. Finally, for all of that, Sweden was also close to the worst performing economy among its neighbors. Final economic numbers will take some time to really settle in, but what is clear is that Sweden didn’t get any economic benefit for not declaring an official lockdown. Finally, let’s not compare for a moment. Sweden failed on its own terms. Here are some of the things Tegnell said we’re gonna be the benefits of the strategy: 1) Close to herd immunity in major parts of Sweden especially Stockholm after the first wave. This was absolutely destroyed when it was discovered that the worst parts of Stockholm had about 10% infected at most. It was nowhere close to the minimum 20-25% they were predicting. 2) Much better second wave than neighbors. Besides a couple of weeks lag (I’m not entirely clear why this lag existed, but Swedes have a summer tradition apparently of retreating to nature etc, which likely played a role in the improvement over summer as well as delaying the spread), Sweden has once again become the worst affected of its neighbors. 3) Better 2nd wave than 1st. It’s not worked out that way. The 2nd wave is worse than the first. It would be one thing if the Swedes were like “oh well, this is how we want to do it”. But Tegnell has relied on both Swedish exceptionalism “oh, we Swedes are better than everyone else and so don’t even need to declare lockdowns” and contradictorily has also criticized other governments any week things haven’t looke as bad in Sweden.
- enriquec 6y ago
  Tegnell was proven right according to the latest research: "Previous studies have shown that asymptomatic individuals infected with SARS-CoV-2 virus were infectious3, and might subsequently become symptomatic4. Compared with symptomatic patients, asymptomatic infected persons generally have low quantity of viral loads and a short duration of viral shedding, which decrease the transmission risk of SARS-CoV-25. In the present study, virus culture was carried out on samples from asymptomatic positive cases, and found no viable SARS-CoV-2 virus. All close contacts of the asymptomatic positive cases tested negative, indicating that the asymptomatic positive cases detected in this study were unlikely to be infectious." https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19802-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19802-w
  - catears 6y ago
    To me, this sounds like Tegnell (who is an expert and has studied viruses and pandemics) knows what he's talking about. If you've ever seen an interview with him it becomes quite apparent that he's got a real scientidic mindset.
  - telchar 6y ago
    That study is an extremely weak support to the claim that this virus can't spread asymptomatically - it's nearly useless for that purpose. They only studied a small number of people at the very tail end of the infection who showed that they had some evidence of virus in them. They did not look at whether those patients actually had an active infection - they could have simply been detecting remnants of dead virus in their systems. They certainly didn't look at all at people in the incubation stage pre-symptoms.
    - enriquec 6y ago
      Nature is one of the two top journals in the world and their conclusions directly contradict what you're saying. This was a study of 10,000,000 people.
      - 6y ago

catears 6y ago

Maybe I should make it clear I don't defend the strategy. I'm not an expert and honestly I don't know what the best national strategy for protecting against a pandemic is. Regarding the lack of information for the elderly care tough, I know Anders Tegnell (who was the spokesperson for FHM during most press conferences) have said in several interviews that he regards that as a failure on FHMs part. They believed that stressing that the elderly were the most vulnerable would be enough, but says that this was probably a mistake.

addicted 6y ago

The Swedes have been misleading so much on this whole issue it’s hilarious. First, Tegnell refused to believe in asymptomatic transmission. Then he lied that herd immunity was never considered but we have emails from him to the broader scandinavian health directors saying that they should consider herd immunity through natural infection. Then they insist that the only reason Sweden looks so bad is because of care homes (which, btw, is greatly affected by the fact that Tegnell didn’t believe in asymptomatic transmission well after every health department was officially basing policy on it). Well, care homes amounted to about 50% of Swedish deaths. So even if you completely excused Swedish care home deaths, while doing no such thing for its neighbors, it still had a death rate that was 2.5x that of Denmark and even worse compared to its other neighbors. So if we count Danish care home and old people deaths, but don’t count Swedish care home deaths, Sweden is still 2.5x worse in terms of death rates. Finally, for all of that, Sweden was also close to the worst performing economy among its neighbors. Final economic numbers will take some time to really settle in, but what is clear is that Sweden didn’t get any economic benefit for not declaring an official lockdown. Finally, let’s not compare for a moment. Sweden failed on its own terms. Here are some of the things Tegnell said we’re gonna be the benefits of the strategy: 1) Close to herd immunity in major parts of Sweden especially Stockholm after the first wave. This was absolutely destroyed when it was discovered that the worst parts of Stockholm had about 10% infected at most. It was nowhere close to the minimum 20-25% they were predicting. 2) Much better second wave than neighbors. Besides a couple of weeks lag (I’m not entirely clear why this lag existed, but Swedes have a summer tradition apparently of retreating to nature etc, which likely played a role in the improvement over summer as well as delaying the spread), Sweden has once again become the worst affected of its neighbors. 3) Better 2nd wave than 1st. It’s not worked out that way. The 2nd wave is worse than the first. It would be one thing if the Swedes were like “oh well, this is how we want to do it”. But Tegnell has relied on both Swedish exceptionalism “oh, we Swedes are better than everyone else and so don’t even need to declare lockdowns” and contradictorily has also criticized other governments any week things haven’t looke as bad in Sweden.

enriquec 6y ago
Tegnell was proven right according to the latest research: "Previous studies have shown that asymptomatic individuals infected with SARS-CoV-2 virus were infectious3, and might subsequently become symptomatic4. Compared with symptomatic patients, asymptomatic infected persons generally have low quantity of viral loads and a short duration of viral shedding, which decrease the transmission risk of SARS-CoV-25. In the present study, virus culture was carried out on samples from asymptomatic positive cases, and found no viable SARS-CoV-2 virus. All close contacts of the asymptomatic positive cases tested negative, indicating that the asymptomatic positive cases detected in this study were unlikely to be infectious." https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19802-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19802-w
- catears 6y ago
  To me, this sounds like Tegnell (who is an expert and has studied viruses and pandemics) knows what he's talking about. If you've ever seen an interview with him it becomes quite apparent that he's got a real scientidic mindset.
- telchar 6y ago
  That study is an extremely weak support to the claim that this virus can't spread asymptomatically - it's nearly useless for that purpose. They only studied a small number of people at the very tail end of the infection who showed that they had some evidence of virus in them. They did not look at whether those patients actually had an active infection - they could have simply been detecting remnants of dead virus in their systems. They certainly didn't look at all at people in the incubation stage pre-symptoms.
  - enriquec 6y ago
    Nature is one of the two top journals in the world and their conclusions directly contradict what you're saying. This was a study of 10,000,000 people.
    - 6y ago