Today, according to Worldometers,
the country with the fastest growing rate of increase in COVID-19 cases in the “western”
world is Sweden. Outside of the U.S. and Russia, today’s increase in new cases of
2,214 is the highest in hard numbers; although well behind the U.S., in terms of per
population this is more than three times the U.S. rate of increase. After a slow
start in being counted, its death rate is catching up to that of Spain, Italy
and the UK, and will likely surpass them as a percentage of the population. Unlike
other countries that took the pandemic seriously, Sweden’s virus problem is far
from “topping off.”
While other countries, such as in
Latin America, have had difficulty in implementing lockdown orders because its
social safety net programs are practically non-existent—due to the large number
of people who work in the “informal” economy, such as day labor and selling
produce in markets to survive—and some populace countries, such as India and
Bangladesh, have massive urban slums that make it almost impossible to practice
social distancing, Sweden does not have such rationalizations for what it has
done. Unlike its neighbors Norway, Denmark and Finland, which have managed to
stave-off significant impacts, it has proceeded as if it was “business as
usual,” with not closing its borders, or requiring social distancing, or the closure of
businesses or schools—and it is now paying the price for it, and its older
population in particular. The belief that the elderly would be “protected”
being isolated in care homes would prove a false assumption; instead they have
turned into houses of death. Care givers would give the excuse for not wearing protective
masks or limiting visitation by claiming that they had not received the written
“guidance” to so.
What happened? A Swedish
epidemiologist, Anders Tegnell, was apparently tasked by the government to
provide it cover for keeping the Swedish economy “open.” Tegnell would claim that
Sweden would eventually develop a “herd immunity,” meaning a large percentage
of the population would catch the virus, and although a few more vulnerable
people would die, it would be “worth” the risk because the population would
more quickly develop a “self” immunity. The problem is that this hasn’t
happened. Tegnell’s claim in early May that herd immunity would soon reach
40 percent in Sweden turned out to be overly optimistic; recent reporting
indicates that testing in Stockholm revealed that only 7 percent had evidence
of antibodies against the COVID-19.
Today, many in Sweden are
outraged that their aged parents and grandparents were allowed to be killed-off
by the virus because of the government’s lax policies—and some of them may be
next. But there are those who charge that the Swedish population’s preference
to do their “own thing” without government interference is also at fault; the
Swedish people expected to go about their daily lives, and conned themselves
into believing they were acting with “common
sense”—or at least that was the belief behind the “advisories” from the Public
Health Agency. Yet there are still those, like health minister Lena Hallengren,
who are trying to pass the buck for their own inaction, blaming it all on a “society-wide”
failure, and employers who did not provide workers with “proper guidance.”
But the reality is that when
government officials do not take health crises like the COVID-19 seriously, how
is the public expected to do so to, especially when it is not in its “nature”
to do so? Even the “unofficial” reason
to avoid lockdown rules in Sweden, to keep the economy running, has turned out
to be a chimera, with the country’s economy expected to contract at a faster
rate than it neighbors, which did enact lockdown policies.
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