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Comment by tpmx | Hacker News Reader

Swede here:

It's complex. I'm extremely unhappy with the way the Swedish gov handled this.

I see two main failures:

1. Not reacting quickly enough. Denmark and Norway reacted quickly and strongly back in early March 2020. At this critical point, Sweden's "CDC" dropped the ball in a monumental manner, and the government didn't pick it up.

2. Not protecting municipal elderly homes in a competent way, early on. This is where most deaths happened. Norway in particular handled this so much better.

And of course we should compare ourselves to e.g. Denmark/Norway/Finland.

I think the root cause of all this is that Sweden has not been involved in a war in a very long time, unlike our neighbors. We're pretty good when things are stable, but apparently awful when things are dynamic/shit is going down.

Of course I have very specific opinions on what "actually" went wrong and why, but that would be too detailed to be useful here and also way too partisan.

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I think you are forgetting two important facts that counter your arguments:

1. A significant number of Swedes were in Lombardy (northern Italy) at the time the European outbreak started there. Furthermore Sweden has at least two major companies with presence around Wuhan. So by the time government noticed the issue it was too late.

2. Elderly care employees in Sweden are basically gig workers, resulting in a huge rotation in care givers and further spreading of the virus. The Social Democrats (and the Left party V) have often been opposed to this.

Two more things to consider:

1. This difference between Sweden and its neighbours is also clearly visible in the flu pattern over the year. It is simply due to different living and travelling conditions.

2. The municipalities are somewhat independent of the central government. Some with the highest death numbers among the elders where controlled by the opposition (e.g. Stockholm).

So while the government could have done a MUCH better job, your comment is already fairly partisan by cherry picking or ignoring facts.

Why were so many Swedes in Lombardy?

Around February there's a whole week where schools are closed with the incentive to do sports - especially winter sports (given the time of the year). A lot of people go to ski resorts - the alps (or up north in Sweden - which got mountains but is far from the Alps).

I lived in a town of about 800 people during the onset and first year of the pandemic. More than a dozen people from my town alone were in Lombardy and a couple of the super early outbreak areas of Germany during 2020 sportlov (the break that stpe mentions in parent comment). I knew first-hand a lot of people who were really ill in March and April, though I don't know if it was covid for sure, since our testing was insufficient then. Anyway, yeah, lots of Swedes traveling to the wrong places at the wrong time right then.

There are counter arguments to your counter arguments: 1. If you are mentioning large amount of people over in outbreak territory, Taiwan had 700K white collars working in China and 150K passengers travel between China and Taiwan weekly. Taiwan took action fast enough to avoid any major outbreak. Flight screening started on the last day of 2019.

2. Huge employee rotation may be exactly why govt should step in?

The biggest problem with the discussions on most subject is that everyone cherrypicks their data or just don't have whole picture. And this picture is a realy big one.

For example Sweden already had a big spread because of the big traveling weeks of school holidays. People tend to cluster together in certain areas from different countries. The Finish people goes to this location in the alps, the Norwegians to this other, and the Swedes to this third place. Turns out the third place had a superspreader in the pub. Mystery solved?

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