Monumental incompetency/groupthink at our small CDC-equivalency (Folkhälsomyndigheten) during the spring. Disaster was narrowly avoided by heroic work by healthcare workers/hospitals. A lot of people died though. Death per capita levels are similar to US levels, not to rest-of-Nordics levels (e.g. Norway/Denmark/Finland). This isn't acceptable.
Herd immunity was the obvious plan all along although it was publicly denied. Recent "leaked" emails have revealed the truth.
The same people responsible for the above are still in charge. It will be a long winter.
Source: Jag är svensk. (I am Swedish.)
Take care and all the best!
Not "similar", it was the highest per capita death rate in the world alongside the UK for 2 months.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deat...
Their policy was and continues to be an abject failure.
Real healthy community discussion going on.
> However, email exchanges obtained by Swedish journalists under freedom of information laws show Tegnell discussing herd immunity as an objective in mid-March, days after the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic.
However, herd immunity was never the goal, as you can read from the email exchanges in the original source the article links to. It was merely a discussion about a possible side effect of the actual goals, which was to prevent a collapse of the Swedish healthcare system, and to prevent side effects that lockdowns have (because they're not a silver bullet either).
Now, if they were successful is another question. I'm a Swede and I do not agree with our strategy.
This is not a defense of the strategy they did follow, which appears to have failed badly.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53498133
> Sweden's authorities never said achieving herd immunity was their goal, but they did argue that by keeping more of society open, Swedes would be more likely to develop a resistance to Covid-19.
https://www.politico.eu/article/sweden-coronavirus-didnt-see...
> Speaking to Times radio on Sunday, Torbjörn Sohlström said that Sweden’s maverick no-lockdown coronavirus response did not seek to boost the number of infections and reach a critical mass of infected to stop the virus from spreading.
etc.
(It might help to consider what a "herd immunity" strategy would actually look like, vs the extremely light touch they actually took.)
Final edit: this was a good look at the handling from a NZ journalist talking to a Swedish researcher from Lund University who looked at the international media coverage. Worth a listen if you want to understand how the "Sweden herd immunity" meme spread https://www.rnz.co.nz/programmes/the-detail/story/2018769007... _and_ how that's hiding some of the negative aspects of the Swedish approach you might not have heard about.
It's good to know some jurisdictions haven't lost the ability to discuss things on scientific merits just yet.
Long history.
Edit: To the downvoters, see sibling comments. Just because it doesn't fit whatever narrative you want to have doesn't change the facts.