Thank you for that. I spent some time trying to pin down just what Sweden was doing (see comment immediately above) and there's no magic to it. In short, the government and health system is using basic epidemiologic control procedures and doing it properly in stark contrast to what we have in the U.S. I'd be happy to receive your opinion of my comment.
You are absolutely right in that we haven’t had any ”denying ” the epidemic and we didn’t do any regular close-down as other European countries did and we where also hit the hardest in Scandinavia. But We did already have a common spread in our country when the other Scandinavian countries locked their countries down. There are also several European countries that where hit as hard as we even though they had lock-downs.
We did do contact tracing in the very beginning (that is how the Italy branch was stopped)
but as we realized that the virus was already spread in the population, we stopped. We have started again now as the figures have gone down. We didn’t do any wide testing until end of May. This was due to several factors: The tests available before then was only testing if you had Corona at that very moment of testing and they where not that reliable. The argument where that it would only communicate a false sense of security since you could walk out from such a test and get infected the second after taking it.
Instead of locking down completely our Government agencies went out with recommendations, main ones being:
• All business travelers coming back where to be set in quarantine at home for 2 weeks
• Everyone that could ,should be working from home
• Restaurants should put in safety distance between tables and parties. No bar seating.
• Stores should make sure that no crowding was present.
• No social events or entertainments with more than 50 people.
• No visiting for elderly-homes.
• Everyone with slightest symptom should stay home from work and isolate themselves from all interaction.
I believe that there also is a language misunderstanding: When our Government agency's say: ”We recommend” It is not a recommendation that you can follow if you like, it is an order: If you go against a government recommendation you can get prosecuted. It has happened to 2 people who went to work even though they where (knowingly) infected by Corona and several restaurants has been closed because they didn't follow the recommendations.
They also communicated advice to the populations:
• People over 70 should isolate themselves and not have close interactions with others
• People should keep distance between each others in public communications
and so on.
The goal was to make sure that the healthcare system didn’t brake down as it had done in Italy and Spain and to keep the risk groups safe. We managed to do the first but failed to do the second, here is why:
In the very beginning there was a shortage of mouth guards and gloves for the healthcare industry . (France even stole an earlier ordered big shipment from a swedish company that had there production in France, and used it for themselves) This made the governments to issue a big recommendation that the intensive care should have the equipment available first and foremost and left the elderly care to fend for themselves. The caretakers where therefore in many cases not protected as they walked from person to person providing care. So if one caretaker or one resident was contaminated soon everyone was. As I told you in my earlier post this is where most of the deaths happened. Agencies also, in the beginning, missed to put out their information in several languages and therefore many people living in communities with mostly immigrants where hit harder than the rest of the population.
As I told you in the earlier post the key is our trust in Government agencies. 80% of the population has followed the recommendations and the advice's to the teeth. Among the 20% that didn’t 18 % has been people in “non risk” groups (Mostly healthy people under 40 that feels that they had no risk of dying if they where hit) and I can assure you that even if these people went out jostling and hugging each other they did follow the advice's in not being close to their old relatives and the 2% of total deniers has not been enough in numbers to keep the virus to spread.
Since the figures has gone down, freeing resources from healthcare intensive-care and we have a better understanding of the virus than we did in February and also better tests, we now test Healthcare personal and elderly to a big extend. In Stockholm we also have made available testings for if you already been infected in the general population. But this is now, not when the epidemic was raging (as it is in US at the moment)
