Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/12/17/we-have-failed-swedens-king-carl-xvi-gustaf-admits-failure-on-coronavirus-herd-immunity-strategy-as-covid-deaths-multiply.html
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I’ve got a friend who moved to Sweden about 5 years ago, and she’s just texted positive. Honestly, since she’s a teacher I’m amazed it didn’t happen sooner.
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At least Scott Atlas and his orange boss didn’t get to implement this same strategy in the U.S. They were more than willing to sacrifice the massive number of lives needed to make it work (because the economy is the real priority, amirite?).
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At the Federal level they basically did. It is only because of a handful of reasonable states that we aren’t significantly worse off.
Oh, really asshole?
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I didn’t know that the King of Sweden got have an opinion separate from the government.
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This theory was preferred by some local politicians, right after preventive treatment with hydroxychloroquine, antibiotics, zinc, vitamin D, garlic and dewormer.
They loved to show obscure statistics about the Scandinavian country, which they said proved social distance was not an acceptable action.
Now they are going to pretend it never happened.
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i think normally the king doesn’t. this is pretty rare. ( but so are pandemics )
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Waiting for one of the intensely nationalist Swedes to appear in this thread- all those who surfaced magically to rage against any criticism of Sweden’s approach in the past six months. It was striking. I even got private messages on social media from angry Swedes any time the topic came up that, “hey maybe your numbers aren’t so great”. I’ve been told the numbers are all lies, that the media is trying to make Sweden look bad, that they have the only viable strategy that saves the economy, etc, etc.
Not that the US has any moral high ground on performance, of course, but at least we publicly acknowledge the disaster (at least here on BB).
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I don’t think the constitutional restrictions for Sweden’s monarch are the same as the ones in the UK. IIRC the king there isn’t really considered the head of state.
And really this is less an opinion than a statement of fact.
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The nice thing about having a constitutional monarch is that he can take the blame for what elected politicians do in his name.
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given that Sweden has the population of NJ in the area of CA, I’d say that conservatives and republicans have run a bigger failed experiment in herd immunity here in the USA.
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I think the only thing that “Saved” them this long was the lower population density. I expected this shit to hit the fan eventually though … because math and eventually people just being stupid over time.
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Aren’t the Swedes concentrated in cities though? I thought a huge chunk of the northern part of the country was close to uninhabited.
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Oh, you and your facts. You know you can’t trust those! You’ve got to use your guts!
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Sweden has obviously done far worse than its Nordic neighbors, but it’s really disturbing to see how, at least since around September, new deaths in Germany has rivaled Sweden in deaths-per-million. Truly a disturbing trend, considering how well Germany managed the crisis early on:
And for background here’s a chart that I look at regularly. At around 934 total deaths per million in population the US is really in no position to criticize anyone at this point, sadly. At least we’re not Italy, I guess?
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Crap, according to that map, we in Lithuania are doing even worse than Swedes.
All because our last government was reluctant to reinstate quarantine before election in October (they lost anyway).
Thankfully quarantine is in place now, and hopefully things will start looking up now, even with the holidays.
Back on topic, I was giving Sweden’s “strategy” a benefit of doubt, but dayum those numbers.
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The number of lives sacrificed is one of the major reasons it can’t work.
This whole bonkers pitch is basically a fancy sounding way of saying “It’ll solve itself by Easter”.
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I’d say their urban to rural pattern of living is very similar to the USA. Large cities, small cities and towns, lots of suburbs, rural lands - and yes, the rural areas and cities are smaller and fewer in the north.
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Angry Swedes? I didn’t know that was a thing. Huh.
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