Comments by "Daniel Sandberg" (@ddanielsandberg) on "Dr. John Campbell"
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Why do people keep spreading the lie that Sweden went for herd immunity? I mean, do you live here? Have you followed our press briefings basically every day since February?
Everybody not living in Sweden seems to think that we did nothing and "rolled the dice" - herd immunity FTW! Of course that is what the international media has been saying. This is nothing but a propaganda proxy war where half the world seems to want Sweden to suffer and 100,000 of us die. Because they are terrified that it would turn out that forcibly locking their populace in their home was generally a bad idea. The US and Australian media are the worst offenders here.
Just because we don't order people to stay at home, or 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 relatively well, events over 50 are banned (sports, cultural, etc), to stay at home if we feel the slightest sick (which most of us can due to our social safety net), 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 and had a large community spread - mostly due to complete unpreparedness and the abysmal rate of testing among other things (because Sweden is a bureaucratic hellhole) 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 and months (like gyms, stores, etc), some restaurants switched to take-away only and a lot had to close because they had either no customers, no 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). I have been working home alone for 33 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 7 months. Some others take a more lax approach, fine, I'm not. We basically did a self-imposed lockdown.
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. The public health agency is responsible for the general public health. This includes everything from domestic abuse, cancer, dietary/exercise to poverty and children's education. So not only the health of the populace for this year, but the health of everyone for the next 10, 20 and 30 years.
It's like the world went mad 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's been turned into a contest where points are measured in harshness of lockdown and deaths per capita. It is all very convenient isn't it? When people have a single leader to place all the decisions on, and therefore also someone to place all the blame on when things does not work out. If people would dare to look themselves in the mirror they would realize that most of the failures comes from the people being selfish and not caring of others - Sweden is no exception to this, there are egocentric dungheads here too. The point is that the government does not exist to hold your hand, to tell you what to do or to 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." It's amazing that we are even able to make a sandwich without starting a war.
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 something like this was enforced was when we had a Cholera outbreak in Stockholm killing 4000 - in 1834.] Since the corona virus 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 take actions 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 crisis or 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. The government may create (temporary) laws to implement the recommendations and instructions from the public health agency if needed. 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 temporary "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, no-one have tried to push it into any area that goes against our constitution.
Everything is decentralized, regions and municipalities are responsible for their local healthcare/covid-response, everyone is responsible so no-one is responsible and it took three months to get any kind of large scale testing going and that didn't happen before the government gave $700M to the regions for TTI.
What actually happened was that the public health agency and politicians was asleep at the wheel. And that is how we failed in three words: Too. Damn. Slow.
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Welcome to Sweden. Same issue here. Even though we are well aware of the general seriousness of the situation, the absolute sh*tshow that is the "elder care" is finally being recognized. We've known that it has been bad for years but everyone "in charge" has been in denial until now. More than half of our deaths have been in care homes or old/sick people being cared for in their homes.
I'm so angry at the state of the healthcare in Sweden. We used to have a national emergency stockpile of medicine, PPE, etc. and then we sold the pharmacies to private interests and the stockpile was dismantled. We used to have a military stockpile for wartime healthcare, it was rather old but instead of keeping it fresh and up to date they burned most of it and didn't replace it. Yes, you read that right. Burned it! We used to have the best healthcare in the world, now we have the least amount of ICU beds per capita in Europe.
*The endgame of a 20 year long story of shooting ourselves in the foot: *
February: "We are well prepared!"
March: "-What do you mean 'we are running out of medication and PPE'? -We burned it, sir!"
April: "-Why are so many dying in our care homes? We were told we had the best healthcare. -We sold it, sir!"
May: "-Oh, OOH. Our healthcare actually sucks! Maybe we shouldn't have dismantled and sold it off to private interests. -Duh!"
June: "-Hey EU, our healthcare workers are burned out and recovering from COVID-19, can we borrow some from you? -Same here, good luck!"
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