Fair point about Germany, but locking down like the rest of Europe is not a question of gloves or medical equipment. There must have been different reasons for that decision.

Swedish and biased here, but as far as I understand a large share of the deaths come from nursing homes. The tactics to limit the spread in those homes failed. However, that is largely a separate question of policies for the broader population, which is what most news outlets have been reporting as controversial.

The PPE is only part of the problem. A couple of decades of budget cuts meant elderly care has been suffering lately. Staff is stretched extremely thin and lots of temporary staff means you can have some staff that works in 4-5 elderly homes in a short period of time. No resources to isolate those returning from hospital after having the disease. So they basically end up back in the same home, where they are cared for by that staff that works with uninfected patients and in several other homes.

The messaging from the authorities was clear: don't do that. Protect the elderly. The mistake was believing that saying it would magically make it happen, when there is no money, no training, no equipment.

> To be fair, they didn't have the resources to do it any other way.... For example, lack of gloves etc led to spread of covid in elderly care homes.

That doesn't make sense. Social distancing (which includes lockdowns) is a mitigation for the lack of other means of infection control (like PPE and treatments). If you don't have PPE, then you have to social distance more strictly to reduce transmission.

I see no evidence to support that claim.

They could have imposed much stricter measures to limit public gatherings and do it faster, even more public messaging, clearer guidelines, working to make sure that everyone was inline with the guidelines.

Yes it would have helped with massive amount of testing, which they said wasn't possible, and tracing and more effective quarantine.

Maybe ask their neighbouring countries, who managed to do it?

Apparently Sweden had a few large nursing homes, whereas Denmark had lots of smaller nursing homes, so it was easier to manage the spread.

In the UK having lots of nursing homes also caused a massive problem. They're usually responsible for their own PPE, but that obviously became infeasible since the government could both seize shipments and outbid them on behalf of the NHS. So the government had to stand up a network to get PPE to thousands of care homes as well as all the hospitals and clearly didn't have an existing plan to do that quickly.

I don't see why having larger nursing homes makes it harder to control how many people get the virus in general. Yes it might affect the death toll, but how's that change the fact that both Denmark and Norway has halted the spread of the virus while it's still spreading uncontrollably in Sweden?

Isn't it much easier to control a few large nursing homes than lots of small ones? In Germany all nursing homes where off limits for everyone.

AFAIK they didn't have very different resources from Norway, but Norway decided to be much more careful and lockdown more and earlier.

Norway: 237 deaths

Sweden: 4468 deaths

(Yes there are more people in Sweden than Norway, but not that much more).

My (personal, subjective, I'm not a doctor, etc…) impression is that Sweden authorities where afraid of overreacting and the economic fallout of that. The Norwegian government (despite currently being right-wing) still decided to be careful and eat the economic cost.

Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Norway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Sweden

There are additional relevant aspects:

1. A main aspect of the response, i.e., the issuing of "recommendations" instead the implementation of outright restrictions seem to have been caused by legal concerns, which means this is probably not something that Tegnell and his team decided.

2. Norway can rely on its natural resources and on the resulting "oil fund" to mitigate an economic crisis, Sweden lacks such resources, at least to the Norwegian extent.

3. The Norwegian government is "right-wing" from a Scandinavian perspective. Many of its policies would be considered socialist in the US.

4. Most deaths in Sweden are related to elderly care and the lack of preemptive efforts to prevent covid-19 spread in elderly care homes, which was certainly a big mistake, but somewhat unrelated to many of the measures that Sweden is scrutinized for.

Regarding 2 the Swedish state economy probably hasn't been in a better shape to pump money into the system in the last 20 years. The whole talk about "spara i ladorna" (save in the barns) by the minister of finance has been widely criticized before 2020,but has left the government in a very favourable position compared to the rest of the EU.

Nr. 4 is spot on, though.

I agree, but both from a technical and a social perspective, a) Norway is in a stronger position to mitigate the economic impact of the crisis and b) Norwegian politicians will have a harder time to spin up an austerity narrative.