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Comment by vesinisa | Hacker News Reader

Tegnell has previously categorically denied any mistakes were made, but is now saying a stricter approach should have been taken in hindsight. In Swedish political culture, it seems to be a big thing if even a hint of a mistake is admitted by an authority figure. Directly criticizing public policies is almost a taboo for ordinary civilians.

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Tegnell has been openly discussing mistakes they made for at least a month:

https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-sweden-lockdown-...

Today’s article is consistent with the statements he made last month.

As others have pointed out, we won’t know if the approach was successful until after we see post-reopening trends.

Note that back then he only acknowledged that there has been more deaths than they thought. But he did not back then think having adopted a different strategy would have necessarily saved any lives, because many of the deaths were in elderly homes.

In yesterday's press meeting, he admitted that given what they know now Sweden would have actually adopted a different strategy. It was at perceived as the first actual admission that the adopted policy was in fact too open.

Given that the policy mistake might have at this point lead to thousands of preventable deaths, he understandably treads very carefully.

There is a strong culture of reaching for consensus, and to (in most cases) follow rules and recommendations, but it's nothing even close to a taboo to criticize public figures.

We generally criticize everything, and everyone, but there are very few screaming matches. What is scalding criticism in Swedish eyes might not always register as such unless you are aware of the culture.

It's (probably) to some extent down to how written Swedish works in concert with our predominantly protestant culture.

Swedish is reasonably good for factual discourse, and quite awesome for writing a dramatic epic with words that soar. Hitting the space in between, without sounding ridiculous, is rather hard.

Most love songs and poems written in modern day Swedish are very indirect because of this, as they would risk sounding ridiculous otherwise. Life is rarely epic on the scale of the sagas.

This also makes public discourse sometimes seem a bit odd, because as the last thing you want to do is to make yourself and your criticism sound inane. Scalding criticism might look more like a slight disagreement if you read it in a newspaper and considered the words at face value.

I assume you've never looked at a Swedish newspaper then, they've all been full of criticisms and discussions since the start.

As a fellow Nordic citizen our media monitors the situation in Sweden very closely. One point that has been raised is the "consensus culture" of Swedish political discourse where no one seems brave enough to openly question the chosen policies. Even the hermit opposition party Sweden Democrats toed the government's line loyally.

In lieu of domestic alternate voices, we have other Nordic health officials questioning the Swedish strategy instead: https://www.thelocal.no/20200520/interview-my-belief-is-that...

Is Tegnell really the only credible epidemiologist in Sweden? Given that pretty much all of Europe has adopted a different strategy, that does not seem plausible. But is there anyone in the Swedish public sphere actually challenging Tegnell's ideas?

Yes there have been quite many. But the sad thing is that they have been shouted down because their rethorical skills were not that good. So the discussion turned dishonest, not interpreting their viewpoints with the best intent.

Exactly. Life and death of thouands of people should not be decided based on someone's charisma alone. Even if something is done in the name of a scientific experiment - like Tegnell's unique policy - it is outregeously unethical if this causes avoidable mass death to innocent civilians.

Sadly Sweden is no stranger to application of questionable and unethical scientific experiments to the masses. The country had an extensive Nazi-inspired eugenics programme from 1930s all the way up to the late 1970s:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/mar/06/stephenbates

The very existence of this programme was a secret until the early 2000s, and to this day continues to be a taboo in Sweden.

> Directly criticizing public policies is almost a taboo for ordinary civilians.

This could possibly be the worst lie I've heard this week. And I've listened to Trump.

That struck me as an odd statement as well. If anything, the amount of criticism used by grass root movements on social media is bordering being an issue. A self-fueling fire.

There have now been several articles documenting the attacks that have been the consequence of questioning Tegnell's decisions in public. This is one example (in Swedish)

https://www.aftonbladet.se/debatt/a/kJr5b6/jag-anklagar-er-f...

But in DN (behind a paywall) there have been other articles where those that questioned Sweden's policy have even been personally threatened.

Tegnell has been wrong about pretty much everything - from saying that the pandemic had reached its "peak" in Sweden when we had 137 cases[1] to being consistently wrong about how far we've supposedly come with 'herd immunity' - which was supposed to be around 50% by the beginning of June, but which has shown itself to be only around 7-10% in the worst-affected areas in Stockholm.

There is also a lot of finger-pointing in articles and comments by Swedes, accusing other Nordic countries of purposely under-estimating their covid figures - whereas the actual statistics[2] show that Sweden itself is the only Nordic country with massively under-estimated deaths.

[1] https://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/a/RRpj0A/statsepidemiolog...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronav...

Regarding [1], it sounds more like Aftonbladet is either misquoting him, quoting out of context or The title claims he said we had reached the peak, giving the impression of peak infections across the whole population, but the contents only covers a specific group of people who had returned from their vacations in Italy.

I'm not saying he didn't mean or say peak total infections in the interview. I'm just saying that particular article is all over the place.

Edit: On the contrary, according to the article he said we could very well be hit by a new wave from new arrivals.

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