The main problem in Sweden hasn't been the rejection of a lockdown, it's not
protecting the elderly care well enough. But this is what happens when there
are barely any educated people within it. Compared to Norway for example that
have a mandatory 3 year nursing education to be working within the elderly
care. Heck the absolute majority of the elderly didn't even get any treatment
once the infection was a fact.
Swede here. The leadership in Sweden has consistently tried to find different
ways of justifying the strategy. Blaming the results on failing elderly care
has been one such tactic. When you compare the raw numbers the proportion of
elderly care deaths is actually in line with (or even less than) neighboring
countries.
I feel like Tegnell s original mistake was his disbelief that asymptomatic
spreaders existed. His entire strategy was based on this and worse, he loudly
and publicly criticized other countries that chose to lockdown because unlike
him they were fully convinced about the existence of asymptomatic spreaders.
Once his strategy to protect the vulnerable failed dramatically due to
asymptomatic carriers (and the fact that people make bad decisions), it was too
late for him to back down and it s been Iraq war all over again. One day he is
criticizing other countries saying that what they are doing is not sustainable
and then in the next breath complaining that his strategy has been
misrepresented and what he is doing isn t different from what the rest of the
world is doing.
It s been unfortunate to watch his inability to admit his initial mistake lead
to so much unnecessary suffering and pain.
He's made a long string of bad judgement calls and spurious statements.
However, I'm more appalled by the government's complete mismanagement. They
have completely pushed responsibility onto this single man, who cannot be held
accountable in public elections. His job is to be a key advisor. The
politicians are the policymakers and the only enforceable decisions they've
made is pretty much to prohibit gatherings of more than 50 people and close
down high schools.
To a degree, they did a sane thing: listened to the advice of an expert. Now if
you look at the other side of the ocean where the orange man didn't listen to
the advice of an expert, look what happened.
I don't know how these things work in government, but relying on the opinion of
just a single expert might not be the best strategy to win here. It's unlikely
though that policy makers will come out in the worse shape here than they were
before because even though they might have failed (a big if in the long run),
they've relied on the advice of the experts rather than their beliefs.
Let's look at the track record of the supposed experts at FHM. A few
favourites:
"The virus will not spread in Swedish society under the current circumstances.
We might see a few cases." (February)
"A large proportion of the population will gain immunity, this will lead to
herd immunity. No patients will have to be triaged away." (March)
"The number of ICU patients and infected elderly is stabilizing. Our measures
in society are proving effective." (March)
At some point, a responsible and reasonably intelligent person will realize
that maybe this particular expert is lacking in expertise and the two dozen or
so of other domestic experts (all of them virologists, epidemiologists,
professors in medicine etc.) that are fervently recommending stricter measures
might have a point.
Swedish politicians have a great knack for avoiding the responsibility they ask
for in the elections, and they're really good at shifting blame. I sure hope
they won't get away with it this time.