Just to be clear, in case anyone claims I am pretending to be something I am not, I am not a Swedish native. I am a naturalised Swede that has lived here for over two decades. Originally I come from the UK. So I am a citizen of two countries that have had a genuinely terrible response to COVID-19, but for rather different reasons.
The problem with that article that it makes the mistake that so many do, it concentrates on deaths only as if that is the only metric. We all surely know by now the dangers of “Long Covid”. From lung scarring to amputations, the dangers of having COVID but surviving it are well documented.
But even then, Sweden’s deaths right now are bad. Their total deaths don’t look as bad because they more or less disappeared over the summer. The daily peaks now, which are still rising as registrations are often delayed, are not far off what they were in April and May.
Note: this is confused right now as in April/May Sweden was announcing deaths daily, but now they only do it on a handful of days a week. This means many graphs, like Google’s default, show higher spikes that in the Spring. I tend to use the charts on Dagens Nyheter’s live blog, which you can find here:
Scroll down to “Avlidna i Sverige per dygn”. On that chart they add the deaths on to the actual day of death, rather than leaving it on the day the death was registered. For today the chart is entirely black as no figures were announced today. On days where they do announce deaths they add them to the chart in red so you can see how far back they are adding deaths on. It really can be as long ago as two weeks previously.
One VERY interesting thing they have on the same page, just a little bit further down, is the “Antal nya bekräftade fall i Europa dag för dag”. That’s the number of new cases in europe, day to day. You can choose between totals (“Antal fall”) and cases per 100,000 (“Fall per 100,000 inv”). Right now, the most up to date chart is from yesterday (19th December). From that you can see that in Europe the only countries doing worse than Sweden (873/100,000) are:
Lithuania (1359)
Croatia (1109)
Serbia (946)
Turkey (1430)
Every single other country, including the headline grabbers of the UK, Spain, Italy and Belgium, have a lower infection rate than Sweden. That isn’t “poor numeracy”. Those are the numbers. Those are facts.
I missed the edit window. The end of that post should be this:
From that you can see that in Europe the only countries doing worse than Sweden (873/100,000) are:
Turkey (1430)
Lithuania (1359)
Croatia (1109)
Luxembourg (1072)
Slovenia (973)
Serbia (946)
San Moreno (928)
Montenegro (928)
As you can see, several of those are tiny city states. And most of the rest are Balkan states, not known for their healthcare system and infrastructure.
Every single other country, including the headline grabbers of the UK, Spain, Italy and Belgium, have a lower infection rate than Sweden. That isn’t “poor numeracy”. Those are the numbers. Those are facts.
This is an interesting article from today:
It covers what I mentioned yesterday, how the media has been complicit in this, actively going out of its way to shout down anyone that dares criticise the Swedish response.
I am personally of the opinion that Tegnell needs to be sacked. Not resign, be sacked. I don’t accept the argument that “I might look like a figurehead but agencies in are very much working as a whole. This isn’t something I decide alone in my office every morning.”, Tegnell was the man who chose his words when he was being interviewed or holding press conferences. Tegnell repeatedly offered up personal predictions that time and time again proved to be wrong.
I don’t know. From what I understand lung issues are far more common. I mentioned it as I thought it might resonate with the Americans reading, seeing as the White House Security Director has had part of his leg amputated.
ETA:
To make it clear, I was offering the range of complications that don’t involve death. I am becoming increasingly frustrated by people and media outlets that concentrate on deaths alone. But again, EVEN THEN, Sweden’s death count is bad.
Well, there’s approximately 185,000 amputations every year in the United States. Do you think covid will contribute to that figure significantly?
I’m not going to bother getting into speculating about American amputations. I was offering a range of serious complications that are well documented. The point was that using death as the only metric of success or failure is wrong.
So give us the metric on Swedish amputations. Or lung scarring. Because everyone always says that we should talk about that but really, they don’t. It’s usually used merely as a tactic when the death count argument isn’t going right. So tell me, how is covid affecting the number of amputations or of people with permanent lung scarring?
As I have said multiple times, the death count is still bad in Sweden. It is flattered by the quiet summer, where most people retreated to the countryside. Now the death rate is very close to what it was in the first wave. I live in a, frankly, small city where 3000 people have died.
But to be absolutely honest, we don’t have the stats right now, mainly because the healthcare system is overrun. But if you want a short radio report to listen to, here’s this:
- Approximately 150 000 people are thought to be experiencing long-term Covid-19 symptoms in Sweden according to one estimate, but there are no specialists to diagnose them.
- There are now calls for research funding for ‘long Covid’ patients and multi-disciplinary clinics.
- “We have not learned enough about this and the patients are being left on their own” says Åsa Kristoferson Hedlund, who has suffered with Covid symptoms for eight months.
You are demanding stats that we don’t have because we don’t have a healthcare system that can handle the current situation. All we know is that it is happening and estimates are rather high for “Long Covid”. And, as you can see from the quotes above, these people feel very much as if they are being ignored. A bit like the articles that concentrate on deaths alone.
And with that I am going to go have a very late lunch. So don’t take me not replying as a sign of anything.
ETA:
To make this really clear: The fact that we don’t have the stats is the entire point. In all the worries about deaths alone those suffering with the long term effects are being ignored.
Most of what he says has been discussed in this thread. First off, I’ll say that this doctor’s predictive abilities are not very good. This is what he said in August 2020.
Now he’s saying that because his assessment of the situation is similar to that of March/April and things went back down again, the government doesn’t need to do anything this time either.
The people went along with what the government did in March/April and many suffered for it. The doctor surmises that the politicians are trying to boost their poll numbers.
Or maybe they just don’t want to see as many people suffering or dying as happened in March/April.
I agree with his assessment that Sweden has the lowest hospital capacity of any country in the area. That was discussed early in the thread. If it’s true that they’ve lowered the standards to admit people into the ICU so that more people might live, that seems like a good thing to me. Increasing the standards to get into ICU and letting people die seems like a bad thing to me.
First, weird article. It says that the reason that US schools closed is because of strong teacher’s unions and that European countries have weak unions so they were forced to open. Having teachers’ unions that protect the well-being of teachers seems like a good thing to me.
On Sweden’s schools, there’s not much that has been studied about them. I found a couple articles. But it’s hard to compare how they’re doing because not much is written about them. Based on this article, they practice social distancing, national testing is cancelled and there seems to be a hybrid model of remote learning and in-classroom learning.
Individual school districts have shut down and high schools and colleges have been shut down for the duration of the pandemic.
In many ways, it doesn’t sound all that different than the US response.
They have appeared to be candid whilst maintaining essentially the same damn policies. That’s not really acting in the spirit of candor, then.
Thanks for posting that article from TES. I hadn’t seen it, or anything like it, and I found it enlightening. I’m glad to see they haven’t simply refused to make any changes and ignored all threats, which it wouldn’t surprise me if some believed.
I guess what I would take away from it all is that the most meaningful contrast between nations and their approaches, in terms of the effects their efforts have had and will have on children, is what they assume as their default states. It seems clear in the case of Sweden that they’d have to see serious reason to not stay open. If European countries ‘were forced to open’ and US schools have managed to avoid that fate, they seem to have come at it from the opposite angle.
If you’re truly interested, you can read this Vox article as a starting point to do some research on long term effects of Covid. Since the virus infects so many cells, the damage can happen in several body systems. Lung damage has even been reported in people who were asymptomatic. Cognitive decline is a major lingering effect. Myocarditis, deep vein thrombosis, strokes, hypogonadism, etc. These effects sometimes last for several months.
Your attempt at contrarianism leads you down some blind alleys and into some internal contradictions. You started out saying that Sweden keeping schools open was a success, but are now saying that closing certain schools shows flexibility. Your narrative is not cohesive.
In other news, Sweden is banning the UK from travel into Sweden due to the new strain of coronavirus in the UK.
I am aware these are happening, some of them quite serious. But I think a lot of it is stuff that we’d probably see in other diseases if they were studied this intently. I mean would it really shock you if men hospitalized for any number of infections had low testosterone? And " between 10 percent and 88 of Covid-19 patients will experience at least one symptom for many weeks or months" covers a whole lot of ground.
As I said, if you were genuinely interested in the topic, you would use that article as a starting point and at least look through the sources within. It would give you a better perspective and perhaps a different opinion than, “if other infections were studied this much”. If not, then I don’t feel the need to further engage.
This isn’t the thread to engage on that anyway. I would appreciate if you didn’t assume I haven’t looked into this at all. I don’t need that article as a “starting point”.
Blanket closures themselves don’t show flexibility, and you know that. I am happy to maintain that Sweden’s stance of keeping schools open if at all possible is absolutely a more successful policy than the one that keeps them closed as long as it possibly can – which has been a catastrophic failure everywhere it’s been tried.
Once again, anything remotely approaching nuance seems often lost in here. All or nothing, and it you’re not with us you’re against us, is how it comes across. I think you want to paint Sweden’s approach as being entirely hands-off (easier to argue against?), but that simply has not been the case. Good on 'em, if they’ve found a way to target local outbreaks and nip them in the bud with temporary school closures, the same way schools in many places have historically done with other diseases. That’s not the same thing as blanket closures, or abandoning their strategy of minimizing disruption to the education and quality of life of their youth.
Well that’s certainly a take for the country with one of the worst daily new infection rates in Europe.