and then magically, “well, it’s too late to do anything now.”
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Like Mel Gibson in Braveheart except if he kept yelling “hold!” until after everyone had been trampled by the oncoming enemy forces.
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That just ain’t true. By March of 2020 we knew very well that a 14 day hard lockdown would wipe out this virus. The problem was we couldn’t get anyone to do it. Furthermore this isn’t even the first coronavirus pandemic. Asia has had lots of them, and we know what works and what doesn’t from their experiences.
Hell, the idea that quarantines and social isolation stop pandemics predates the germ theory of disease. Almost as long as humans have lived in cities we’ve known people pass illness to each other, so we need to isolate when a pandemic hits.
Defending Tegnell’s recommendations as based in science (or saying no science was available) is ludicrous. We knew it was a bad idea before we even had science. In modern times we have tons of science telling us what to do in these situations.
I assume all the people in this thread rushing to defend Tegnell are the Swedes? It was notable in every BoingBoing thread last year criticizing Sweden’s policies that all the Swedes would come out of the woodwork to vehemently defend what the country was doing, despite all the data to the contrary. Sweden is an amazing place with amazing people (I have worked for multiple Swedish companies) but on this, she misstepped badly.
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I’m not sure anyone here is rushing to defend Tegnell. If you’re including me in this, I’m certainly not Swedish, or even Scandinavian (though I’ve lived in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Norway, and Yorkshire). I followed the policy discussion in Sweden closely last year (from just across the very closed border), it was very open and public, and involved quite a large number of Swedish scientists from a number of medical and health disciplines who were unafraid to share their views for or against the policies. I disagreed with their decisions, but they were certainly not the result of authoritarian suppression of science.
It should also be noted that Tegnell himself rejected some of the attempts by the American and British right wing to mischaracterize then coopt the Swedish policies.
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Those people are emotional children. They are not going to eat their broccoli and you can’t make them. Send their doses overseas.
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A hard lockdown wasn’t legally possible in Sweden. The government doesn’t have that kind of authority. To be really effecitve it should also have been made on a global scale, as we’ve seen otherwse the disease just jumps from place to place as soon as lockdowns are eased.
I think you also may have misunderstood my comment. I wasn’t trying to defend Tegnell, just describing his attitude. Sometimes making qualified guesses on what will probably help is better than waiting for firm evidence.
What I find surprising is all the interest in Sweden as either a role model or a horror story, given that if you look at actual outcome we’re about middle of the road.
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It’s really only Norway, Denmark and Finland that are directly comparable due to social attitudes, size, population distribution and climate. And those all have negative or only slightly positive excess mortality in that table.
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Some are, lots of others are responding rationally to a bad set of incentives. For example, one of the largest blocks of unvaccinated people are low income workers who have said they can’t afford the time off. I know I missed about three days of work combined between my vaccinations. A guaranteed three unpaid days off may outweigh a hypothetical more days off if it is the difference between keeping and losing your home. It is fully within the scope of policy to shift those incentives, by for example mandating paid time off for vaccination related absences (note I favor a much stronger policy, but this is easily manageable.) Sure, there is a large block of die hard antivaxxers, and fuck them, but there is a separate block of people who can be reached and washing our hands of that just means a lot more dead people.
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Yeah, I was thinking about that when I was knocked out with side effects for two days after my second vaxx. It was a weekend for me and I could have easily gotten the time off fully paid if it had been during the week but if I had been a minimum wage worker in another country, one where I would lose my income and possibly my job over this, I would have thought twice about taking that hit.
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This isn’t what Worldometers is showing.
Norway is at ~600 new cases per day.
Sweden is at ~775 new cases per day.
Norway is at ~1 new deaths per day.
Sweden is at ~1 new deaths per day.
So, what’s the story? That’s not 10 times anything.
This is about historical performance, not current post-vax conditions (misleading headlines notwithstanding)
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Yep. Looking at deaths per million since March 2020:
- Norway: 150
- Finland: 183
- Denmark: 443
- Sweden: 1450
Scaled to population, that’s about an extra 13,200 deaths compared to bordering countries. For a sense of scale, this is a country where about 200 people die each year in car crashes.
Sweden didn’t perform badly compared to the UK, USA, or Spain, and were only about twice as bad as Germany.
Among the rich countries, Sweden’s health outcomes weren’t the worst, and they weren’t average; “bottom quartile” is fair.
I’ll leave it to the economists in the thread to say whether the goal of reducing economic impact paid off.
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It’s not legally possible to enforce it by government authority in any democracy, probably. But lots of places did it voluntarily and it helped a lot (as shown by the stats). You’re engaging in the nirvana fallacy here.
Again, nirvana fallacy. The regional lockdowns help a lot and places that have done them have much better stats. The data is all over the place on their effectiveness. Many countries closed borders to limit spread from places that didn’t lock down. Canada closed its border with the US for over a year and many provinces limited travel between them as well. You can also mandate testing on entry which Canada and many other places now do. Lots of options. You seem to be acting willfully ignorant on all this to make it seem like Sweden’s hands were tied.
I think his attitude is much better explained by political pressure not to have lockdowns, then rationalizing that with bad science. The Swedish people seemed to strongly support this even though it was scientifically unwise so it’s clear there was political pressure.
I don’t think you’re reading what I’m writing. We had mountains of evidence from this and past pandemics by March 2020 when places started locking down. We knew and continue to know what the best thing to do is.
I’m going to bow out of this thread now. You’re not engaging in an intellectually honest manner here.
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Sweden has adopted considerably more neoliberal policies and privaitzation, and it has has received a lot more refugees. The government was bad at reaching them in their native languages, and they often live more crowded with more close contact wthin the groups, at the same time as they often have manual jobs health care or other areas where they get into contact with other people and can’t work from home.
A not entirely negligible dfference was also that Sweden weathered the preceeding yearly influenca epidemic with less casualties, leading to a larger extremely frail elderly population.
Sweden did several mistakes, as did most other countries, but it s a bit crazy how Sweden has become part of the war between factions in USA.
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