Swedish King Carl XVI Gustaf says coronavirus approach 'has failed'

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-55347021

by jgilias • 6 years ago

44 78 6 years ago

bbc.com

ginko• 6 years ago

I don't see how the Swedish king's opinion on this has any more weight than asking a random person on the street.

the_mitsuhiko• 6 years ago

Doesn’t matter insofar as that the opinion of the king appears to be shared among Swedes.

davrosthedalek• 6 years ago

I'm not defending Monarchy in any way, but it's his job to care about the Swedish populace. That he hasn't been elected to this position doesn't mean that he does not fulfill his job, so I would assume that at least he is better informed than the random person on the street.

prox2• 6 years ago

He is technically the head of state, which means that he probably speaks for the government in some way or form.

RobertoG• 6 years ago

A king is normally the head of state (1), so it would be the equivalent to the president of a country denouncing the the strategy of the government (and with it criticizing the head of government).

The main difference between a king and a president is that, with a president, if he/she is corrupt or incompetent you can remove it. With a monarch your are stuck for life.

In my opinion, the greatest virtue of democracy is not the power to choose who govern you, but the power to remove it from power peacefully. Historically that is pretty remarkable. Of course, in the case of Sweden, the king has a very limited power. The point is, it's not a random person.

(1) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_Minister_of_Sweden

tinus_hn• 6 years ago

A difference is that when asked loaded questions like this reported did, he can’t just not answer. ‘People died because of this policy’ what is he going to say? He’s not going to go into some statistics debate to show another point of view, he’s going to say that yes, that’s terrible.

Svip2• 6 years ago

I think it shouldn't be understated the significance of this. It is extremely rare for a constitutional monarch to so publicly undermine the democratically elected government. The Danish Queen and Norwegian King made speeches this Spring, where they were very careful to not undermine the government's strategy, but rather emphasis the significance of the pandemic.

Additionally, in Sweden, it is has become pretty recognisable by all that the Swedish approach has failed, but no one is willing to take the blame. The King effectively cuts through all this, and says the blame lies squarely with Prime Minister Stefan Löfven.

In political terms, I wonder how long Löfven's government will last.

kzrdude2• 6 years ago

You say that the prime minister is to blame, but the King doesn't say so explicitly, and I point this out because in Sweden's media climate it is for some reason not obvious that the PM is to blame when it all falls short. Because they (the PM and cabinet and the health authority) name their own factors and institutions that they blame.

I think the PM should take responsibility, so evidently say you, but unfortunately the King didn't say that.

ruslanbogan5• 6 years ago

It is a very unswedish thing to point the finger and blame someone from what I can tell, the best you will get is "not my fault"

Svip2• 6 years ago

You are correct, that the King is not explicit in this, he cannot be, he's a constitutional monarch. However, the subtly is thick, and it's not hard to read between the lines, that he is thinking the government of Sweden has failed Sweden. He represents the government of Sweden, and when he is indirectly apologising, that's the statement he is making.

And who is liable for the government in the end? Prime Minister Löfven. I think it's hard to read anything else between the lines here.

libertine4• 6 years ago

It's maybe time to EU to follow through and admit that both EU and individual countries approaches were a disgrace that costed, and will cost, too many lives.

leokennis2• 6 years ago

Wait...what would have been the better approach then?

ruslanbogan5• 6 years ago

The EU would just enact a covid tax for anyone infected

taeric6• 6 years ago

I don't get the criticism of the guidance being "voluntary". The bigger question is more in compliance, no?

That is, if they have compliance rates that are comparable to the countries that do have legal recourse, do we have reason to think legal recourse would have gotten them better compliance?

learc835• 6 years ago

If you're talking about wearing masks in public, it looks like their numbers are low--implying that voluntary compliance isn't working great.

For an example, I was driving through rural Alabama, which has a state wide mask mandate, and at every convivence store I stopped in, everyone was masked. Right next door in Georgia, which has the opposite of statewide mask mandate (the governor made local mandates illegal), almost no one was masking.

The same is true for my home county. There's a mask mandate--everyone wears a mask. Move one county over--no mandate and almost no masks.

bzb6• 6 years ago

Voluntary compliance is working great: people can do whatever they feel like doing, which is literally the point of voluntary compliance.

taeric6• 6 years ago

I haven't seen reporting on their numbers in compliance. The reporting is mostly like this one, focusing on it being voluntary. But then not stating how effective is otherwise it was.

They definitely have high numbers of covid. So does most everyone. :(

elliekelly• 6 years ago

This Yale study[1] collected data from every county in the US about which restrictions were in place and then tracked how many people got sick. Their data[2] distinguishes between “mask mandate” and a “mask recommendation” and the study author is quoted that the recommendation “doesn’t do anything”. Of course this is all US data so I’m not sure whether or to what extent it would apply to Sweden’s compliance with a mask recommendation vs mandate.

[1]https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/study-shows-which-res...

[2]https://som.yale.edu/covid-restrictions

0x4454422• 6 years ago

Yep. In order to claim something a failure you need objective criteria to begin with. In terms of Covid those objective criteria never existed and thus the King's claim has as much meaning and weight as mine that Sweden's handling of Covid has been a wild success compared to other countries.

taeric6• 6 years ago

My gut would be that the US is not very comparable to Sweden for compliance rates. Though, a lot of that will depend on how partisan the message has been there.

Even here in the US, some mandates have gotten worse compliance than others.

jariel2• 6 years ago

This is a fair question.

Because I really do feel that systematically, it's not legal enforcement that is the issue.

99% of it seems to me would be workplace orders - if all governments spaces (aka public transit) require masks, and most corporations require public masks, then it's going to be hard to go to to many places without them.

Maybe however a lot of individual small restaurants and gyms would flaunt the rules, even under threat of shame, which is maybe understandable since the proprietors are facing basically collapse and losing their entire life's savings etc..

jgwil22• 6 years ago

I saw a picture of people in a subway car in Stockholm earlier this month and 90% were maskless. The no-lockdown approach shows a fundamental lack of seriousness that filters down to everyone. In the United States we see this phenomenon just as clearly in Republican-led states.

Izkata• 6 years ago

just as clearly in Republican-led states.

They aren't doing any worse than Democrat-led states though, so no idea how you can say this.

cygx• 6 years ago

Covid dynamics in red and blue states are different, see eg https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Brill-10_20-2... [1]

Blue states were hit early on. Case numbers in red states caught up at the beginning of Aug, hospitalization numbers at the beginning of Oct.

I'd be interested in the cumulated death rate as of today (but not so much so to calculated it myself...)

[1] https://www.aei.org/economics/impact-of-the-coronavirus-pand...

brigandish2• 6 years ago

Not only is it probably too early to judge any country's response properly, I wonder how far his expertise, or even just his reasoning, enables him to make a judgement worth listening to.

It's worth keeping in mind that the BBC likes to play the journalistic game of "holding the government to account", which really means they will support a kind of response (lockdowns) tacitly while criticising the government for any piece of bad news (because they didn't lockdown / didn't lockdown fast enough / hard enough) while also engaging in the kind of general doom-mongering that does nothing to inform or educate. Like much of a UK media that shares its outlook, there's been nigh on 6 months of articles looking for any sign that Sweden's largely voluntary strategy will or has failed, as Spiked noted[0]… oh, 6 months ago in May, so it seems it's been longer than 6 months.

For a far more balanced view of Sweden's response, I recommend this article[1] in the Spectator. I suspect I'll have to wait another 6 months until the sun is back out for another of its ilk.

[0] https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/05/28/why-they-hate-swede...

[1] https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-myth-of-sweden

pwinnski• 6 years ago

Life comes at you fast, so articles from 2.5 months ago, as the Spectator article is, aren't much more helpful than articles from 6.5 months ago, as the Spiked article is.

To the point in the Spectator piece, though, it could easily be argued that the US is similarly incapable of imposing real lockdowns, for both legal and cultural reasons.

brigandish2• 6 years ago

I agree about the time aspect, though the Spiked piece was to show that the desire of some in the media for Sweden's failure has been going on for a long time.

it could easily be argued that the US is similarly incapable of imposing real lockdowns, for both legal and cultural reasons

Completely agree, but again, the media made their focus Trump instead of detailing the situation as it really is (which is not to ignore his input). That must not sell enough papers nowadays.

josep-panadero• 6 years ago

Why there is no lockdown in Sweden? One of the reasons is how legislation works in Sweden:

"Sweden cannot legally declare a full state of emergency to deal with corona, says an expert in constitutional law - and right now Sweden can't declare a lockdown and confine people to their homes either, as has been done in Britain, France, Spain and other countries.

Tormod Otter Johansen is a researcher in public law at Gothenburg University, he says, however, that legislation introducing the possibility of wider lockdowns could be introduced very quickly, as the government has shown over the past few weeks with other legislation to deal with the effect of the coronavirus."

https://sverigesradio.se/artikel/7454661

So, it is possible to change the legislation to enable the goverment to call for lockdowns, but it needs some more steps than in other countries.

The current main criticism, thou, relates to eldery care: "Corona commission criticises government over elderly care" https://sverigesradio.se/avsnitt/1625475

The current recomendations can be found here: https://www.krisinformation.se/en/hazards-and-risks/disaster...

juusto• 6 years ago

It does not surprise me that this approach has failed.

Folks don't mask up and, also, do not keep the distance as required. Visit a supermarket, metro or restaurants (yes, restaurants are open!) and you won't see anyone using masks or distancing.

Anecdotally my wifes work place only started WFH recommendations once 6 people got infected. On industries such as software almost everyone I know has been WFH since February but many folks insist in going to the office.

On the beginning of the pandemic retirement homes were badly hit which would lead you to think the government would learn something. It did not happen and lots of places are being reinfected.

Recent news headlines to keep in mind:

-Gov is thinking in requesting private practice nurses to help with the load on public hospitals

-Talk of neighboring countries "sharing the burden"

-Elder care not well equipped to deal with this wave

-ICU occupancy reaching 99% in Stockholm

thu21112• 6 years ago

Some people are seeing what they want to see: the Swedish approach hasn't failed. Lockdowns have failed.

Remember Sweden was supposed to see 25x hospital overflow and 100,000+ excess deaths according to the models. Instead they have seen a basically normal year in which excess deaths might come in to about 2,000 to 3,000 by the time December is counted.

Meanwhile, lockdowns were meant to just last a few weeks to help ride out a temporary exceedance of hospital capacity. 9 months later people are still locked down with no end in sight, considering that many vaccines don't attempt to halt transmission. Meanwhile there are no correlations visible between severity of lockdown and healthcare outcomes. None. It is a 100% and total failure as a policy.

The media and international establishment types have been pumping out anti-Swedish propaganda for a long time now. You have to double check it carefully to notice it's false. For example, ICU capacity is extremely flexible. Sweden more than doubled it via a variety of mostly administrative means in the first wave and never ran out, even though in the first wave there were more hospitalisations than in the second. The occupancy figures that get thrown around are thus frequently meaningless because the denominator can change so fast. As for "thinking of requesting private nurses to help", is that meant to indicate a crisis? Why should anyone turn their lives upside down to avoid hospital managers having to do such trivial and basic things?

Meanwhile, lockdowns caused a significant fraction (nearly half) of all excess death in the UK in the first wave, and there's significant evidence that COVID is being significantly over-classified even on death certificates in the second wave. The economic destruction will undermine healthcare spending for years or even decades to come. The destruction of confidence in public health officials and 'scientists' is even more severe. It's a catastrophic policy that Sweden correctly ignored, and their reward is a basically normal year:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-...

sto_hristo• 6 years ago

Everyone completely lost the point of lockdowns, which is to simply severely limit the spread of the disease until health care system is reorganized to face the challenge. If your hospitals can accept patients and nobody is left outside to die on their own, because there's no capacity in country, then by no means you can say that you failed.

It's absolute insanity to throw your country in the pit of perpetual isolation in order to "save everyone." You can't save everyone even if you home-jail 100% of the population. The virus will not magically disappear no matter what you do, especially when it's do contagious.

This guy is being a populist just like anyone else nowadays. Say and do whatever nets you more upvotes.

ruslanbogan5• 6 years ago

A huge amount of people in care homes died of covid because the government neglected to handle the situation properly according to a Swedish inquiry

https://www.ft.com/content/e66b2d2b-aa70-4866-a9cb-2cd095f4f...

lsllc2• 6 years ago

The same thing happened in the US North East, NY, MA, CT, NJ -- the majority (e.g. over 2/3) of deaths are in long term care homes.

That is the problem to solve, lockdown or not, in most countries we have utterly failed to protect our most vulnerable people. In fact I'd go as far as arguing that lockdowns and restrictions for the general population have diverted attention and effort from protecting the LTC homes & the vulnerable.

jariel2• 6 years ago

The point of lockdown is to bring the total number of outstanding cases way down, so that society can reset, not just hospitals.

If it's out of control, it needs to be brought under control after which time incrementally more open measures can be taken.

jmnicolas2• 6 years ago

According to https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ Sweden is the 24th country for deaths per million.

They're better off than some countries with strict lockdowns like France, Italy etc

0dayz• 6 years ago

That has more todo with population density and health infrastructure.

jmnicolas2• 6 years ago

My point was that the king shouldn't be so gloomy: they don't have more deaths relatively to other countries AND they saved their economy.

evgen2• 6 years ago

If you compare them to neighbors with the same initial infection timelines and vectors, similar population density, cultural norms and habits that were relatively the same, as well as matching socio-economic status you will see that Sweden failed miserably at handling Covid.

thu21112• 6 years ago

More propaganda. You're ignoring the variable that matters most: excess death in the previous year.

https://www.aier.org/article/swedens-dry-tinder-accounts-for...

Include that and you can find the reason for this supposed mystery: Sweden had an extremely low number of deaths in 2019 compared to its neighbours. They'd have regressed to the trend sooner or later anyway, whether it be via flu or natural attrition, but it ended up being COVID.

This comparison also assumes there are somehow great differences between European countries, that Sweden and France are as incomparable as Sweden and Saudi Arabia or India. Nobody ever presents an argument for why that is, so these "don't look at France or the UK, Sweden can only be compared to Norway" argumetns end up looking like motivated reasoning.

Swedish deaths are not going to be anything remarkable this year compared over the last 10 years. Probably 3-5% higher than the 10 year average, so a few thousand deaths, all of whom will have been very old. For a supposedly deadly pandemic that's pretty good.

ardy42• 6 years ago

They're better off than some countries with strict lockdowns like France, Italy etc

That's an apples and oranges comparison. Sweden is far worse off than their neighbors, that are far more similar to it than France and Italy.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/15/world/europe/sweden-coron...:

Infection numbers and deaths have been rising steadily since October. By Tuesday, Sweden had reached a total of 320,098 cases since the beginning of the pandemic, while its neighbor Finland, with a population about half of Sweden’s, has 31,110 cases, less than 10 percent of Sweden’s.
Sweden’s total death toll reached 7,667 as of Tuesday. The country now has 74 deaths per 100,000 people, less than the United Kingdom, with 97, but far more than its neighbor Norway, with seven.

distracted_boy• 6 years ago

I just want to highlight the fact that our beloved King made this comment after Mats Melin, leader of the corona commission[1], said that we have failed protecting our elderly which was top priority [2]. The reason for this according to Mats, is because institutional and structural flaws in our geriatric care system. These flaws made it impossible to prepare and manage the pandemic. In addition to these flaws, Mats also says that counter measures set in place during the year was either too late or too little. Furthermore, Mats says very clearly and explicitly that the responsibility of the institutional and structural flaws in our geriatric care is shared between the government, administrative authorities (gov. agencies), counties and private sector. Even so, the current government (and previous governments) has been well aware of the flaws and the utmost responsibility lies with them.

I believe more could have been done, but solely blaming our prime minister is just irrational. For example, the local government in the three biggest regions, Skåne Stockholm and Västra Götaland, made the decision to cut down on the items in their pandemic storage area[3]. Guess what happened when nurses and doctors were asking for more supplies.

There are of course other instances where politicians prioritized money over health, which had a negative impact on people's lives, which covid-19 only made worse.

Also, it's my opinion that people in Sweden have largely ignored the restrictions. I base this on the fact that walking to the store to buy food, I'm the only one wearing a mask and trying to keep a distance. Friends and colleagues report the same. The fact that IKEA (where I live) was packed with people suggest that people don't care.

[1] https://www.regeringen.se/pressmeddelanden/2020/06/mats-meli...

[2] https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/coronakommissionen-missly...

[3] https://sverigesradio.se/sida/artikel.aspx?programid=83&arti...

ruslanbogan5• 6 years ago

Yep I live in Skåne and so far people are still happy to get too close to you, don't wear masks in public especially when shopping etc.

My workplace only went full wfh fairly recently with the latest recommendations and still 2 weeks ago people were organising face to face meetings...

juancn• 6 years ago

It may be unpopular, but strict lockdowns are untenable in the long term. Living locked down is no life at all, it's just survival.

And I'd rather take my chances if the alternative is perpetual stay at home orders (I'm from Argentina, we spent 9 months in strict lockdown).

At this point, even if the government asks for another lockdown, people are not going to listen.

denimnerd422• 6 years ago

Lockdowns are horribly unfair to those that can follow the guidelines about social distances, mask weareing, etc. I'm not sure what your country did, but especially the European lockdowns when you couldn't even walk down the street. So ridiculous.

Holylander• 6 years ago

Sweden turns out quite strange of a country for the 21st century, reminds me of the USSR in late 80s:

- The situation is bad, real bad, but no one publicly acknowledges that;

- The government, instead of taking unpopular and painful but needed steps to try and handle the problem, makes itself "don't see any problem, our people are happy";

- By all European standards the policy is a mistake, but no one in office steps forward and says so, they rather play to the tune of "we can't see any problem, public opinion of the government is quite high". Kinda of asking to play louder the band on the Titanic.

- Swedes keep on "trusting the government to do what they do as they know better", while it is unclear on what their trust is based.

- To outsiders, this attitude of all sides involved sort of means "we accepted 'the devil take the hindmost' philosophy as we want to keep our daily happy about routine unchanged, so be it". Again, as I said - typical thinking of USSR of 80s. It didn't end well.

ruslanbogan5• 6 years ago

- Swedes keep on "trusting the government to do what they do as they know better", while it is unclear on what their trust is based

This is based on the Swedish belief that they are the smartest people in the world and that everyone else is dumb therefore their government's plan must be good and every other world government is just being hysterical

krankas• 6 years ago

Not really, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante

Swedish King Carl XVI Gustaf says coronavirus approach 'has failed'

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