Comments by "Daniel Sandberg" (@ddanielsandberg) on "Joe Scott"
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I am disappointed that you didn't bother to do your homework about Sweden.
Everybody not living in Sweden seems to think that we did nothing and "rolled the dice". Of course that is what the international media has been telling you. This is nothing but a propaganda proxy war where a lot of governments wants Sweden to fail and 100,000s of us die and they are terrified that it would turn out that forcibly shutting down entire countries and locking their populace in their home was generally a bad idea. Our "strategy" is the conventional way of dealing with pandemics humanity has done for centuries and is in-fact the common plan that was discussed for the past 20 years and agreed upon within Europe's different health agencies. I have been working home alone for 24 weeks and the few times I've been to the office I had to walk 10km and 10km home again. I cannot visit my old sick mom and I haven't met any of my friends for 5 months.
Just because we don't order people to stay at home, or not give people fines for stepping out of their homes, or keeping children out of school or shutting down peoples livelihood does not mean nothing was done. We are recommended to socially distance which works pretty well, stay at home if we feel the slightest sick, wash hands and avoid crowded places and public transports.
After we realized that we had been unable to contain it in the third week of March (due to the abysmal rate of testing among other things) and had a large community spread; we were told to work from home, colleges and universities switched to online teaching, cinemas closed, a lot of places closed voluntarily for some weeks or months (like gyms, stores, etc), some restaurants switched to take-away only and a lot had to close because either no customers, staff or unable to follow the guidelines. Stockholm turned into a ghost-town in days (for a while it was as eerie as the pictures we have seen from New York in April).
We are trying to walk the line between reducing the impact of the pandemic in all aspects of society and take a more holistic view. Some might argue that there is an element of herd immunity in this; maybe it is, but only in terms of "we were unable to contain it and we can't really do much from a legal standpoint so we need to make the best of the situation and hope that we will be helped by an increasing level of immunity without doing society harm". Sometimes this feels like giving up and sometimes it feels like the only sane approach. If we Swedes are anything it's being pragmatic and not mass murderers as I was told when I received a death threat from Australia (i think) for simply being Swedish. It's like the world went crazy, and every country turned it into a d*ck measurement contest. No solidarity, no empathy, nothing but a bunch of nationalistic 15 year old boys. It is all very convenient when the people have a single leader to place all the decisions on, and therefore also all the blame when things does not work out. The government does not exist to hold your hand, to tell you what to do or think for you so you don't have to take any personal responsibility, crisis or no crisis. Maybe Richard Dawkins was right when he called humanity "a selfish, condescending hairless ape."
Another thing that people seem to have a problem grasping is how complex adaptive systems work. People get stuck on a single variable - lockdown. A word that used to only be used in military and prison vernacular but has now become commonly applied to whole countries. All the other variables like initial conditions (spread), the demographic of the population (age structures, etc), at which point restrictions was put in place, ability to test, trace and isolate, the absolute abysmal state of a country's elder care, peoples trust in the government, etc. This is called omitted variable bias.
The Law:
According to the Swedish Communicable Diseases Act (2004:168), individuals can be put in quarantine but not town or cities. It is possible, however, to impose a lockdown on a particular geographical area. An area corresponding to a few blocks may be put in lockdown. This means, among other things, that it is prohibited to enter or leave the area. A lockdown can be used when one or more people have fallen ill with a life-threatening disease within a particular geographical area. The lockdown then serves to make it possible to find the source, and to identify any other cases of disease or transmission. A lockdown is a temporary intervention in order to investigate cases of disease or disease transmission. Hence, it cannot be used in order to prevent people from travelling in or out of an area for a longer period of time. [Last time this was enforced was when there was a Cholera outbreak in Stockholm killing 4000 - in 1834.] Since the coronavirus causing COVID-19 is classified as dangerous to society, the county medical officers [not the government] can decide to put healthy people in quarantine. This means that people are ordered to stay within a particular building, e.g. their home, in a specific part of a building, or in a geographical area.
However, putting someone in quarantine is a forceful intervention, strictly regulated in the Communicable Diseases Act. If a less intrusive intervention, for example particular hygiene routines or suspension from work, school or daycare, can achieve the same effect it should be used instead. The Communicable Diseases Act also states that it is each citizens responsibility to reduce the spread of a dangerous disease.
All Swedes have the right of free movement within the country and this right cannot be imposed upon in peacetime. All children have the right to go school, even in wartime. Also, our constitution states that ministerial rule is forbidden - meaning that it's up to the (non-political) public health agency to provide recommendations and restrictions - not the government. If the PM would start giving orders outside his purview there would be an impeachment coming. We also do not have a state of emergency law. We have a new "crisis law" enacted in April that gives the government the power to take some emergency measures without going through parliament. What those measures could be is a bit unclear but it's mostly centered around emergency economic and resource management.
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