Did care homes in Sweden (which are separately organized from the rest of the health care system) manage COVID well? Probably not. Did some people panic and made they stupid decisions? Probably.
Did we dismantle some temporary ICUs without using them? Yes. Did we reach max ICU bed capacity in any region (the Swedish health care system is organized by regions)? Not that I know. Did we have a national health care collapse? Not as far as I can see. If we did, please provide sources.
From the very beginning of the epidemic it has been clear a person with serious case of corona would go to an ICU and put on a ventilator for the best treatment. Hospitals instead told care homes in Stockholm not to send seniors with severe corona in at all:
> Now, increasing numbers of workers are also coming forward to criticise regional healthcare authorities for protocols which they say discourage care home workers from sending residents into hospital [...]
> "They told us that we shouldn't send anyone to the hospital, even if they may be 65 and have many years to live. We were told not to send them in," says nurse who worked in several care homes around Gävle, north of Stockholm, at the beginning of the pandemic.
At the beginning of the pandemic, people thought this. As I understand it, it is actually preferable to keep patients off of ventilators as much as possible.
It is certainly not the case that, if you show up at a hospital and the hospital has unlimited resources, then you should be put on a ventilator because it’s somehow good for you.
What you actually meant was "got a bit busier".
https://coronakommissionen.com/
https://coronakommissionen.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/su...
> The Health and Social Care Inspectorate has shown that there was a marked reduction in the number of referrals to hospitals from residential care facilities for the older people during February–June 2020. However, it is hard to establish whether this type of guidelines led to physicians failing to make individual assessments of care need
So I gather that even if the health care system was never overloaded, there might have been some confusion in the elderly care that led to mistakes.
But to the extent the elderly care system was “overloaded” this has been the case for decades. Not due due to the COVID response.
> We have found that elderly care was unprepared and ill-equipped when the pandemic struck and that this was founded in structural shortcomings that were known long before the outbreak of the virus. The ultimate responsibility for these shortcomings rests with the Government in power – and with the previous governments that also possessed this information
Anyway:
> I guess it all depends on your definition of "collapse". I would describe a situation where hospitals are overloaded to the point where they have to choose who gets to live and who has to die a collapse.
Triaging patients and prioritizing them is every day in a hospital, corona or not. If you talk with a Swedish doctor (I do, because that's the health service I use), they often think in terms of which medicines are cost-effective and for which group of patients they should be used (basically - what is the human basis for using this expensive medication on this particular patient). To make it concrete, maybe they will even tell you that you are a "priority" because you have a long working life ahead of you.
Medicine and care can be infinitely expensive and public health care is a finite resource. They always calibrate towards giving patients adequate care, not infinite care.
So yes, it's not binary between normally being infinate and now not, but it's also a bit too reductive to make that point without also being clear that Covid has caused more and worse triaging than usual. (But someone needed to make your portion of that point and you did it much better than I could have, so thanks!)
A system that is choosing which patients to treat is therefor not collapsed.
Similarly, a bridge that has collapsed transports zero traffic - not 50% of the traffic.
But again, venturing into these semantic debates isn't useful. People choose hyperbolic words in order to justify their preconceived conclusions. The hyperbolic adjectives themselves aren't the point of OP above.
Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules, including this one:
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
150 people arrested in London protest: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-55116470
...including Jeremy Corbyn's brother, who was fined thousands of pounds: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-52693383
People are being arrested just for filming empty hospitals: https://twitter.com/Jen70717630/status/1344332042188845056
Hundreds of people fined yesterday: https://news.sky.com/story/covid-19-hundreds-fined-over-new-...
This is clearly enough to create a chilling effect on socialisation.
They don’t understand that they have invited the fox into the henhouse. This model of crisis response is going to be broadly applied in other situations after Covid is over, and they’ve given the government all the ammunition they need to apply it and enforce it.
When the lockdown started, I moved out of London and back home into a relatively poor area. Most people were in favour of it then, but today I do not know a single pro-lockdown person here that isn't:
1) a student with guaranteed income from their loans
2) a white-collar worker, usually senior
3) is somebody who is retired or has a lot of money
I'm not somebody who advocates for breaking the lockdown, but I wish the people pushing for them need to realise there are real consequences beyond pure survival (like people being evicted or going hungry). Rishi Sunak seems to be the only person in government who seems to understand the economic devastation to follow and is openly worried about it.
Most of my personal circle though is small business owners, and starting with the laughable PPP mess and joke loan offerings, and just screwed up situation economically and shifted consumer habits, many are looking for the exits and running for the hills.
Only a couple in my group are doing really well in all of this, but they cater to the luxury end of the scale and the rich have gotten significantly richer in all of this. One of them does very high end custom pools and he is booked into 2022 with jobs because of all the California money flowing into Arizona.
My main concern is we have green lit tyranny to the governments around the world. For a virus that is arguably no worse than anything else we’ve experienced in the last 60-80 years we have flipped human rights and liberties on it’s head and completely perverted it. We are now in the process of normalizing this situation and behavior long term. The consequences of this are going to be felt for years after this, if not decades. We likely won’t even remember the virus in 5-7 years, but we’ll still be living under the system it ushered in.
> The consequences of this are going to be felt for years after this, if not decades. We likely won’t even remember the virus in 5-7 years, but we’ll still be living under the system it ushered in.
Economically, for sure. From a human rights perspective I can't see us continuing for much longer without large scale riots, like we saw earlier this year but directly focused on the lockdown.
One chilling effect from all this is when something worse than Covid inevitably comes about, reasonable countermeasures are going to be completely ignored.
Sources in English are harder to come by about this, but for example in spring when Stockholm's ICU beds were at full capacity it is implicit that people with better prognosis had to be prioritized. Seniors with severe cases of corona were instead given morphine and sent to die in care homes:
https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/stockholm/skarp-kritik-eft...
Nothing like this happened in Sweden's neighboring countries with more cautious COVID approach because ICU beds so far never reached full capacity. In a modern Nordic welfare state denying a dying person of care that could save their life is not only a complete failure of the health care system but also a crisis of moral values. I am not sure the Swedish public is yet ready to even admit the latter crisis.