Officially, no. In reality, yes, they're basically pursuing a strategy of mitigation.Originally Posted by Hazir
My impression is that they've realized too late that the strategy they (like the UK and a few others) initially settled on has led to an uncontrolled epidemic in major cities, esp. in Stockholm, and they've given up on containment both there and elsewhere. Despite extremely small (= nonexistant or negative) margins during normal conditions, there is a lot of potential for stepping up capacity during a crisis. We have a relatively high number of doctors and nurses per capita, although they're not necessarily where they need to be (would have to be requisitioned/reassigned). We have excess ventilator capacity and can convert wards and rooms on short notice; some hospitals - including my own - have tripled their intensive care capacity by converting facilities and using equipment freed up from canceling elective surgeries. But the situation in several cities is already close to unmanageable, and will get considerably worse over the coming weeks; hospitals in those cities are fucked. Much of the rest of Sweden is extremely sparsely populated, and social distancing measures etc. may help mitigate the situation in those parts. Hospitals in those regions are probably going to have to help shore up hospitals in harder-hit areas.Do they really believe they are able to keep the virus from overwhelming the health care system? Does Sweden really have such a redundancy in the system?
Their justifications are not persuasive, to say the least. There's a article of faith deeply cherished by Swedes that Sweden is "different", that lessons applicable to other countries are simply not applicable to Sweden.Do they really think in the Netherlands people live in multi-generational households?
One of Sweden's greatest strengths is also one of its greatest weaknesses: immense public and political trust in institutions/agencies. Another such mixed blessing is the high proportion of people in positions of authority who have basic military training; there's a great deal of respect for chain of command. In many respects, this is a good thing - it prevents panic, and it enables effective responses to problems. The problem is, under extraordinary circumstances, it means people stop thinking. It places a great deal of responsibility on the agencies responding to an emergency/crisis, as well as on politicians. In this case, they appear to have failed to respond in an appropriate manner, and now they're just trying to keep their heads above water. I think Sweden may be somewhat unique in that agencies responsible for a particular area under normal circumstances are also responsible for crisis response involving those areas, and we've seen before (eg. during the Estonia disaster, the tsunami) that this leads to predictable and avoidable problems with crisis response. There are already calls for instituting a covid19 response commission to learn lessons from our mistakes now, in anticipation of the next wave; at the very least, we can get some explanation for why govt. epidemiologists saw fit to deviate from international recs.Jesus Fucking Christ. It's like I hear the 'specialists' from the agencies that advise out government all over again. The people who first were convinced there was no chance the virus would reach us, forgot to stock up on testing material, did nothing to make the health care system more robust and THEN advised against cancelling Carnaval in the south of the country. Now, you guess, which part of the country has hospitals operating on 'black status' and has to send patients to hospitals in other regions to avoid triage of the lethal kind?
Regions that will only have the capacity to recieve patients of course untill the virus has a party there because too many people still think it's kind of a flu that doesn't really threathen them.
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At my hospital, we have been specifically told not to get "creative", and to not do things we've been told not to do. As a consequence, people have been admitting covid19 pts to wards full of vulnerable patients, and staff have been exposed, for up to a day. At some other hospitals - where representatives of the official response apparatus is less present - they've decided to disregard official Swedish guidance and instead learn from other countries. I am seeing a disappointing side to some people for whose leadership and expertise I have otherwise had a great deal of respect, but, at the end of the day, I can currently only take responsibility for myself and for those working under my guidance on any given shift.
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Yeah, it's going to get bad. They're converting a convention center into a massive field hospital. (Brings back bad memories of Katrina.) 
