# Sweden do-nothing approach good, US/UK/other countries' early do-nothing approach bad. Why?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sweden-do-nothing-approach-good-us-uk-other-countries-early-do-nothing-approach-bad-why/850962
**Category:** The Quarantine Zone
**Tags:** covid-quarantine
**Created:** [April 3, 2020, 2:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sweden-do-nothing-approach-good-us-uk-other-countries-early-do-nothing-approach-bad-why/850962 "2020-04-03T14:44:16Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 19
### Author:  [@MandaJo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MandaJo)
#### Post date: [June 8, 2020, 1:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sweden-do-nothing-approach-good-us-uk-other-countries-early-do-nothing-approach-bad-why/850962/361 "2020-06-08T13:12:32Z")
Could they have protected their nursing homes while letting the virus run more freely in the population? Is that even possible? This is a serious question. Nursing homes have a lot of personal, by definition. Short of having a full time residential caretaking staff, those people will be in and out.
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### Author:  [@CarnalK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CarnalK)
#### Post date: [June 8, 2020, 1:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sweden-do-nothing-approach-good-us-uk-other-countries-early-do-nothing-approach-bad-why/850962/362 "2020-06-08T13:23:09Z")
What’s so difficult about having full time care staff? One of the identified problems in Canada is that many nursing homes use a lot of part time workers for PSW positions, so they end up working at multiple homes. They can also make changes to how many different wards their employees work within the facilities.
It’s my understanding that around here, city run facilities did distinctly better than private with this disease. ISTM, there’s room for improvement.
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### Author:  [@CarnalK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CarnalK)
#### Post date: [June 8, 2020, 1:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sweden-do-nothing-approach-good-us-uk-other-countries-early-do-nothing-approach-bad-why/850962/363 "2020-06-08T13:29:30Z")
Found an atticle:
[For-profit nursing homes have four times as many COVID-19 deaths as city-run homes, Star analysis finds](https://www.thestar.com/business/2020/05/08/for-profit-nursing-homes-have-four-times-as-many-covid-19-deaths-as-city-run-homes-star-analysis-finds.html)
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### Author:  [@DMC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DMC)
#### Post date: [June 8, 2020, 1:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sweden-do-nothing-approach-good-us-uk-other-countries-early-do-nothing-approach-bad-why/850962/364 "2020-06-08T13:39:24Z")
> [@DSeid](#):
>
> There are instead nonscientific beliefs that are being held sometimes misrepresented as “what the science says” by those who have no clue what science is actually about.
I actually have the word “science” in my job title. Somewhere in front of that is the phrase “Head of.” Am I allowed to share my “beliefs” now?
> [@](#):
>
> That said if they had not done so poorly in implementing one key aspect of their plan, the protecting their nursing home populations and elderly in general, they’d be being judged now an overwhelming success, instead of just not having been a complete failure so far.
This would be laughable if it weren’t for the fact that people have died who didn’t have to. There is very strong evidence that the most of the world, including the US (NY had reporting problems, but remove them from the equation and nursing home deaths are 50% here, just like they are in Sweden), has the same or higher percentage of dead in nursing homes as Sweden. Hell, it’s far higher in Canada. If you wish to argue that they didn’t protect their elderly who weren’t in nursing homes. Well, no shit. That’s why we lock shit down. **Sweden fucked up.** That is where we stand based on current evidence. The only way I’ll be proven wrong is if there are subsequent waves and in those waves, Sweden’s neighbors have five or more times the per capita deaths that Sweden gets. That’s how bad their fuckup has been. They are soon going to pass Italy (whose per capita deaths you have called a disaster).
Sweden Fucked Up.
Prove me wrong. Hell, use that science you keep talking about to accomplish this.
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### Author:  [@CarnalK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CarnalK)
#### Post date: [June 8, 2020, 1:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sweden-do-nothing-approach-good-us-uk-other-countries-early-do-nothing-approach-bad-why/850962/365 "2020-06-08T13:57:55Z")
Are you Science’s spokesperson? Could you tell us what is going to happen this flu season? I’m dying of curiosity.
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### Author:  [@Francis\_Vaughan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Francis_Vaughan)
#### Post date: [June 8, 2020, 1:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sweden-do-nothing-approach-good-us-uk-other-countries-early-do-nothing-approach-bad-why/850962/366 "2020-06-08T13:58:13Z")
> [@CarnalK](#):
>
> Found an atticle:
> [For-profit nursing homes have four times as many COVID-19 deaths as city-run homes, Star analysis finds](https://www.thestar.com/business/2020/05/08/for-profit-nursing-homes-have-four-times-as-many-covid-19-deaths-as-city-run-homes-star-analysis-finds.html)
That is a pretty damning article. But also presents some surprises. It seems both public and private homes were about as likely to get an initial infection. The disparity in death rates is after the infection gets into a home. Private homes have much worse infection rates and numbers of deaths.
Curiously, buried in the article they state that workers have been prohibited from working in more than one home.
The model by which homes are run and legislated under seems very different to here in Oz.
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### Author:  [@DMC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DMC)
#### Post date: [June 8, 2020, 2:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sweden-do-nothing-approach-good-us-uk-other-countries-early-do-nothing-approach-bad-why/850962/367 "2020-06-08T14:00:40Z")
Since I’m picking on them so much, I should note that I absolutely adore Sweden and the Swedish people. Haven’t been to Stockholm, but visited Malmö several times over various trips to Copenhagen. Loved everything about it. My beef is with their government’s handling of this and this alone.
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### Author:  [@MandaJo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MandaJo)
#### Post date: [June 8, 2020, 2:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sweden-do-nothing-approach-good-us-uk-other-countries-early-do-nothing-approach-bad-why/850962/368 "2020-06-08T14:11:57Z")
> [@CarnalK](#):
>
> What’s so difficult about having full time care staff? One of the identified problems in Canada is that many nursing homes use a lot of part time workers for PSW positions, so they end up working at multiple homes. They can also make changes to how many different wards their employees work within the facilities.
>
> It’s my understanding that around here, city run facilities did distinctly better than private with this disease. ISTM, there’s room for improvement.
They go home. They go to the store. If you aren’t stopping community spread, the workers will get it, unless they also live in the home full time.
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### Author:  [@DMC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DMC)
#### Post date: [June 8, 2020, 2:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sweden-do-nothing-approach-good-us-uk-other-countries-early-do-nothing-approach-bad-why/850962/369 "2020-06-08T14:16:18Z")
> [@CarnalK](#):
>
> Are you Science’s spokesperson? Could you tell us what is going to happen this flu season? I’m dying of curiosity.
Science doesn’t need a spokesperson. We call that data.
As for the flu season, absolutely. Sierra Leone is expected to have about five times more flu related respiratory deaths per capita than the median country. I guess you could say Sweden is trying to be the world’s Sierra Leone of the coronavirus, if you must.
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### Author:  [@CarnalK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CarnalK)
#### Post date: [June 8, 2020, 2:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sweden-do-nothing-approach-good-us-uk-other-countries-early-do-nothing-approach-bad-why/850962/370 "2020-06-08T14:19:33Z")
> [@MandaJo](#):
>
> They go home. They go to the store. If you aren’t stopping community spread, the workers will get it, unless they also live in the home full time.
Did you look at the article I linked? City run facilities having a quarter the death rate of private? They both had workers going to stores.
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### Author:  [@MandaJo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MandaJo)
#### Post date: [June 8, 2020, 2:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sweden-do-nothing-approach-good-us-uk-other-countries-early-do-nothing-approach-bad-why/850962/371 "2020-06-08T14:30:04Z")
Its behind a paywall. And I readily believe there are things that can be done to reduce spread, but by how much? Enough? If you are going to have community spread for months, wave after wave is still bad, even if they are relatively more limited than some others.
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### Author:  [@CarnalK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CarnalK)
#### Post date: [June 8, 2020, 2:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sweden-do-nothing-approach-good-us-uk-other-countries-early-do-nothing-approach-bad-why/850962/372 "2020-06-08T14:36:34Z")
Huh, wasn’t paywall for me.
Anyway, I’m not saying that long term care homes could have been made impregnable. Yes, that would require quarantining everybody. But if we could have reduced deaths by 75%, that would have beeen pretty good.
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### Author:  [@SayTwo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SayTwo)
#### Post date: [June 8, 2020, 3:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sweden-do-nothing-approach-good-us-uk-other-countries-early-do-nothing-approach-bad-why/850962/373 "2020-06-08T15:42:42Z")
> [@DMC](#):
>
> This would be laughable if it weren’t for the fact that people have died who didn’t have to.
Who _had_ to die in all this?
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### Author:  [@Folacin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Folacin)
#### Post date: [June 8, 2020, 4:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sweden-do-nothing-approach-good-us-uk-other-countries-early-do-nothing-approach-bad-why/850962/374 "2020-06-08T16:10:53Z")
> [@CarnalK](#):
>
> Did you look at the article I linked? City run facilities having a quarter the death rate of private? They both had workers going to stores.
Haven’t read the article, but if the private homes had more part-time workers (which comments here said), then they would have more people going to the store, increasing the odds that one or more of them would catch and then spread the virus.
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### Author:  [@asahi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/asahi)
#### Post date: [June 8, 2020, 5:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sweden-do-nothing-approach-good-us-uk-other-countries-early-do-nothing-approach-bad-why/850962/375 "2020-06-08T17:24:38Z")
> [@CarnalK](#):
>
> The fact that you are so desperate to write the eulogy for Sweden tells me what I need to know. As I said earlier to someone thinking I was “holding on”, all the expert opinion said this is a marathon and that we will almost assuredly encounter a second wave of disease. Now, the lefties are super intent on wrapping up the story on Sweden 4 months in.
>
> To date, Sweden obviously has nothing to brag about. But the rush to judgment people have decided to forget that this isn’t over. The Swedish strategy was explicitly a long term strategy. The upcoming flu season and Spring will be about where we can make more final judgments. Or do you agree with Trump that this disease will soon vanish of its own accord?
You clearly do not understand how public health systems and health responses work.
The explanation that Swedish health officials were thinking that far into the future is not plausible – at all. Public health agencies have tools to deal with long-term threats. Those tools include things like education, vaccinations, buying PPE, and other preparatory measures. But they deal with active outbreaks NOW. The idea that responsible public officials in an advanced health system in a modern industrialized country would seriously just shrug their shoulders and let people die because they were looking 6-18 months into the future is just fucking ridiculous.
As another poster already put it, **Swedish health officials absolutely, positively fucked up** - that is all that needs to be said, plain and simple. They underestimated the severity and lethality of the disease, and they over-estimated their ability to protect the elderly. They chose to be more optimistic than realistic. They believed it was more important to keep the economy going in spite of a raging pandemic, and as if that wasn’t bad enough, their economy’s been dinged anyway.
People need to just stop searching for nonsensical explanations or justifications for Sweden’s failure. Sometimes, obvious conclusions are obvious.
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### Author:  [@asahi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/asahi)
#### Post date: [June 8, 2020, 5:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sweden-do-nothing-approach-good-us-uk-other-countries-early-do-nothing-approach-bad-why/850962/376 "2020-06-08T17:32:53Z")
> [@DSeid](#):
>
> My personal opinion was that in the face of the level of doubt Sweden’s approach was too risky. That said if they had not done so poorly in implementing one key aspect of their plan, the protecting their nursing home populations and elderly in general, they’d be being judged now an overwhelming success, instead of just not having been a complete failure so far.
But that’s the point, DSeid: you can’t play the “What if” game just because you don’t like the results (and I’m not saying “You” as in you personally).
It’s a fatally flawed assumption to assume you can tell most of the under-60 population to go on and live life as normal and spread the disease among yourselves but we trust you not to fuck up just once and kill your elderly relatives. That’s a foolish, foolish assumption -and an irresponsible one, and public health officials practically everywhere on the planet know better. That’s the point, DSeid.
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### Author:  [@DMC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DMC)
#### Post date: [June 8, 2020, 5:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sweden-do-nothing-approach-good-us-uk-other-countries-early-do-nothing-approach-bad-why/850962/377 "2020-06-08T17:34:06Z")
> [@Francis\_Vaughan](#):
>
> That is a pretty damning article. But also presents some surprises. It seems both public and private homes were about as likely to get an initial infection. The disparity in death rates is after the infection gets into a home. Private homes have much worse infection rates and numbers of deaths.
I’m not paying a newspaper to let me read a study that they performed themselves, so I looked for other sources and I’m certainly not defending for-profit nursing homes in Ontario, who definitely have issues. That said, there is a [whitepaper](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.25.20112664v1) in pre-print by people who actually study this for a living. Their take:
> [@](#):
>
> Differences between for profit and non-profit homes are largely explained by older design standards, which should be a focus of infection control efforts and future policy.
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### Author:  [@CarnalK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CarnalK)
#### Post date: [June 8, 2020, 8:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sweden-do-nothing-approach-good-us-uk-other-countries-early-do-nothing-approach-bad-why/850962/378 "2020-06-08T20:01:44Z")
> [@asahi](#):
>
> You clearly do
> People need to just stop searching for nonsensical explanations or justifications for Sweden’s failure. Sometimes, obvious conclusions are obvious.
No one’s doing that. I am just leaving open the possibility that their strategy may benefit them in the medium/long term.
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### Author:  [@HoneyBadgerDC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HoneyBadgerDC)
#### Post date: [June 8, 2020, 8:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sweden-do-nothing-approach-good-us-uk-other-countries-early-do-nothing-approach-bad-why/850962/379 "2020-06-08T20:37:31Z")
In the end stages of life Western civilization goes to great lengths to extend that as far as possible. When something like a virus comes along that cannot be stopped it will naturally take out the weak and vulnerable first but even they have pretty good odds of surviving this. Nobody’s fault, countries have to continue to function as countries no matter what. Long term damage to economies will have even more devastating effects and the virus will have it’s own way regardless in the long run.
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### Author:  [@casdave](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/casdave)
#### Post date: [June 8, 2020, 9:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sweden-do-nothing-approach-good-us-uk-other-countries-early-do-nothing-approach-bad-why/850962/380 "2020-06-08T21:09:40Z")
> [@](#):
>
> No one’s doing that. I am just leaving open the possibility that their strategy may benefit them in the medium/long term.
Perhaps this might be the case - given the changing information about the virus - however this is hardly a strategy, at the very best that could be said this is called taking a chance.
More likely it is an abject failure to manage risk - robust measures might prove to be over the top but risk management is a tendency to fail toward safety rather than fail toward increased danger.
The failure to protect is not post event justification either, being over zealous offers at the very worst the same risks as doing too little, but doing too little can never reduce risks below that of doing too much and there was plenty of precedent and adequate time to implement public health measures. Spain and Italy were just a tiny bit slow off the mark but we can see what happened eventually, Sweden had maybe few weeks to observe the effects in those nations and responded very weakly, and on the experimental evidence of their own social responsibility - now Tegnell admits mistakes and seems to be somewhat surprised.
That surprise is the most worrisome aspect, more robust control measures could have been brought in much earlier even if a little late but no, Sweden had to experiment with its population.
If there turns out to be any benefit whatsoever such as avoiding a second wave it cannot be said with any confidence this was by design, only sheer luck.
Swedes deserve better than playing Covid roulette
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