Sweden avoiding lockdown

the conversation over covid and deaths has already happened, your side lost the argument because it could not deliver what was needed and would have caused preventable deaths for nothing.

sweden's strategy was a complete failure by all metrics.

Not even that. He actually think our "strategy" was better.

You know that one where we shipped every old and vulnerable hospital patient to a nursing houses where quality of service and care is incomparable to the one they had at hospitals, basically to die there.

I can see the rest of the Nordic countries looking at the deaths in Sweden and saying to themselves "If we had only followed their strategy our deaths would be so much lower".

The irony Fintan is you do not seem to understand the meaning of Stockholm Syndrome. Sweden was taken hostage by Giesecke and his "boys" with a strategy that has been shown to be a failure on every verifiable metric. Thankfully for Sweden their local authorities as soon as they were able to put a stop to the insanity forced their government to sideline Tegnell and the rest of the "boys" in October 2020.

You appear to believe that Sweden have a greater percentage of their population older than Denmark and that is an explanation for Sweden having more deaths. They don`t. Neither do they have a greater percentage older than the rest of the Nordic countries. Less in at least one actually.

So if Sweden having multiple deaths of their neighbours is not due to the age of their populations, why had Sweden those multiple deaths while chasing herd immunity compared to the rest of the Scandinavian countries who were not. Was it because all the rest had better hospital facilities than Sweden ?

To be fair theres also now the fairly definitive evidence that locking down doesn't equate to lower covid deaths. But the UK and Sweden are firmly middle of the road in covid deaths per capita. Sweden #16 lowest of #27, and the UK would be #11 if still in the EU. Despite being the two most open countries in the EU over the last two years by a mile.

Ireland had the longest, strictest lockdown in Europe and is only #19th lowest out of #27. Despite also having the youngest population in the EU, and having the highest vaccine uptake - both of which statistically massively help.

If lockdowns worked Ireland would be one of the lowest deaths per capita, and the UK and Sweden would be the highest. But thats not the case at all.

The title of the thread is Sweden avoiding lockdown. Not Ireland and lockdown. Although if you do compare both Ireland and Sweden with their respective neighbours "marginally" better is not the term that stands out when comparing lockdown restrictions to light touch lockdown restrictions.

It is not as if we were the only country that cancelled surgeries and scan because of Covid. Every country has, including Sweden who recently did so again, for the simple reason it is not a great idea to have patients with Covid mingling with patients in hospitals for other procedures which in most cases would leave them highly susceptible to serious illness by contracting Covid.

I know from the experience of someone close to me that a mammogram can be fine one year and cancer the next, with no symptoms and no lump. Scary to think of all the missed diagnoses.

This is utterly without foundation and nothing to do with lockdowns

Please provide evidence that Sweden didnt see reduction in referrals and all other medical services continued uninterrupted. You wont.

The reason we didn`t separate facilities for Covid infections is that we had neither the staff nor the facilities need to to deal with this pandemic if we did not take steps to try and control the spread. That is why we, like practically every other country, used lockdown.

We could not just magic up the staff, equipment and facilities overnight. Citywest as far as I know was ever only an overflow facility to provide the bare bones of hospital care for those that needed it who were least effected, and even for that just this one overflow facility never dealt with large numbers.

Hospitalisations were never the real problem of the health service being overrun. The real problem, as we saw from other countries was when ICU`s became overrun and the resulting rise in deaths. You cannot open up ICU`s around a country overnight. Not just due to the level of equipment required, they also require highly specialised staff to operate them.

The only way of ensuring that those with Covid are kept seperate from those that are in hospital for other illnesses would be to have a Covid and a none Covid hospital in each area with both having ICU capacity. We have neither the facilities, equipment or staff to do that. No health system in the world has or are planning to have. Even if we had the facilities and equipment we still could not have done it as we were short on staff to operate what we had even before Covid.

It would be the ideal solution, but even if we did go for that option with building, equipping, and staffing it would be years down the road before it would be possible.

I have already shown where people were not turning up for cervical smear tests after the first lockdown. Out of 110,000 invites to attend only 12,000 turned up. If we had of actually had the staff to carry out checks during the first lockdown it would have been a waste of resources. The hospitals were quite during lockdown was because, (similar to the cervical smear checks when we were not in lockdown), people were not going to go anywhere near them unless they absolutely had too because of the risk of becoming infected.

The only way we are going to get back to normal, or near normal, is through a reduction in numbers for those hospitalised and in ICU for two reasons. One we do not have the staff to do both, and secondly even if we did, people would not turn up for appointments

Apologies. I missed this post earlier.

At the outset there were only two plans being proposed on how to deal with this pandemic, and only one of them had a Plan B.

One was lockdown for two reasons. One to mitigate the spread of infections and deaths, and two to prevent healthcare systems from being over-run causing even more deaths. The second perfectly understandable imo when the world was seeing what was happening in Lombardy Italy when their healthcare system was over-run.

The other was an attempt to go straight to semi-normal/modified behaviour anticipating that herd immunity could be achieved through infection. Initially both Sweden and the U.K adopted this approach but with rising deaths both were forced to abandon it. Sweden much much later than they should have imo as they knew from early on from their own antibody test results it was not achievable.

The difference when it came to Plan B is that lockdown had one, minimise the spread until vaccines were developed, while the herd immunity strategy did not and just ended up like everywhere else putting their faith in vaccines as a way out of this pandemic. All going straight to semi-normal/modified behaviour achieved was needless deaths which are easily seen when compared to their neighbouring countries who used lockdown.

Politically by whom? I mean, no country is forced to do anything any particular way except by the people within that country, Boris could have rode out low opinion polls for a few years before election if so wished if the other tories would get behind him and not bring down the government.

Why do people keep saying Sweden had a load of extra deaths? They didn't. Yes, 2020 was more than the previous few years, but around the same as 2011 and 2012 and certainly not the highest ever. 2021 saw one of the lowest numbers of deaths on record. People are in denial