This is why Sweden has had a such a high death toll, because of bad care given to the elderly.

One big problem is that nursing homes in Sweden is often run by the kommun (city) whereas the hospital is run by the landsting (region), kommuns lacks the medical expertise on nursing homes to handle that kind of sickness, no oxygen or iv therapy.

And there has apparently been a reluctance to send patience from the nursing homes to the hospitals instead treating them at place, which increased the risk of dying.

Many elderly suffers from malnutrition in these nursing homes, malnutrition increases the risk of early death drastically.

I would also argue that it culturally exists ageism in Sweden, Swedish core belief is state sponsored individualism, you don't have any responsibility on others because your maximal individual freedom is guaranteed by the state, thus you basically dump the elderly on a nursing home never to be seen again, it is not your responsibility, it is the state.

Much of the Swedish society is very youth centric, it is not uncommon to find arguments a long the line, "it is good if the elderly dies off because they are holding us back".

This also explains why Sweden is so eager to jump on every new trend there is, progressivism in a nutshell.

In the supplements, they cite from "LARSSON, S.-O. & HARTIG, M. 2015. Ålderism (Ageism). In: (UPS), U. P. S. (ed.)":

"Sweden also ranks globally among the countries with the lowest regard to the elderly based on pre-pandemic surveys. Ageism, defined as prejudices or stereotypical perceptions based on a person's age and which can lead to discrimination, is a bigger problem in Sweden than in the other Nordic countries. When Swedish people are asked to rank the social position of different age groups in their country, the position of the elderly (70+ years) is ranked as the second lowest in the world. The elderly are also considered to have a much weaker position in society than young adults. This may be a consequence of prevailing individualism and rapid digitalisation and technological development, and weaker ties between the different generations (the family is not at the centre as in several other countries). In the Swedish society, aging is mainly regarded as a biological process of decay or decline, dehumanising the senior in the eyes of the rest of society, leading to marginalization and discrimination; considering the senior as a passive object."

I think most of the care homes learnt after the first wave, at least I hope that my experience was representive.

In the golden years of the Folkhem (the people's home) Sweden was collectivistic to a larger extent, but because of the massive increase of living standards, a huge middle class emerged.

Core beliefs of the middle class is typically high individualism and materialism which usually translates to some form of liberalism.

Many, especially on the right, makes the mistake to equate high taxes with collectivism, but that is not necessarily the case, because it depends on how the taxes are collected and what the taxes are used for.

Today the Swedish's left argument for high taxes is to increase individual freedom, not collective freedom. The Swedish's right argument for low taxes is to increase individual freedom, not collective freedom, thus both the left and the right in Sweden is ruled by the same middle class and every big topic in Sweden since the at least 20 years has been of a middle class perspective.

Reducing society to high vs low taxes is one of the most extreme forms of individualism you can have.

Unless I got the discussion completely backwards, the point here was that these homes are not run by the state. They are either private or by small municipalities, and are not really intended to provide medical care in the same way as hospitals do.

There are probably a lot of details here that's not at all obvious to an outsider of the system, exactly how the care is organized, paid for, and what medical facilities they can access, but I hope that they can learn and improve from this so the next pandemic do not hit the elderly quite this bad.

That some other countries may or may not have been hit worse does not make it any better. This is not a competition.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

Put it this way: imagine somebody gave you the data for deaths for many of the nearby countries, and lots of information about them all; vaccination rates, age distributions etc. The only number missing is Sweden's death rate. Would you have guessed it correctly? or guessed higher? or lower? I definitely would have guesses lower, somewhere between 2 to three times too low. Frankly, even with knowledge that their lockdowns were lax I would not have expected this high a death rate; after all it's not like it was business as usual or anything - people were socially distancing.

I'd say comparing countries like this is fraught, but also that Sweden has an unexpectedly high death toll. Whether it's high in absolute numbers, and what exactly the cause is... who knows. The cause may well be largely unrelated to their policies; clearly the differences between countries in general are not at all easily explained by policy differences, after all. But I don't agree with your statement that it outright doesn't have a high death toll.

This is from the abstract, but as far as I could find, this is never mentioned in the actual text of the paper? Certainly there's no reference to "oxygen", "morphine", or "administer" on the linked web page. So I guessed this had something to do with "end-of-life care", which is discussed in Supplement 6. But I could not find any explicit reference to morphine or oxygen there or in the sources of the supplement, either.

Maybe it's in (Habib, 2020), but the link is broken.

It's easy to find the article, you just google search with the article title.

https://www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m2376

> Yngve Gustafsson, professor of geriatric medicine at Umea University, noted that the proportion of older people in respiratory care nationally was lower than at the same time a year ago, despite people over 70 being the worst affected by covid-19. He expressed concern about the increasing practice of doctors recommending by telephone a “palliative cocktail” for sick older people in care homes.

> “Older people are routinely being given morphine and midazolam, which are respiratory-inhibiting,” he told the Svenska Dagbladet newspaper [5], “It’s active euthanasia, to say the least.”

Euthanasia requires the explicit desire of being killed, clearly expressed by the patient, normally with the family knowledge and after legal consultation that proves that there is excruciating pain are there is not a better alternative for treatment.

And this is killing a helpless person unable to defend his life or will, and blocking their relatives to help him/her in this task. And it was not exclusive from Sweden, probably.

https://www.science.org/content/article/it-s-been-so-so-surr...

"A 17 March directive to Stockholm area hospitals stated patients older than 80 or with a body mass index above 40 should not be admitted to intensive care, because they were less likely to recover. Most nursing homes were not equipped to administer oxygen, so many residents instead received morphine to alleviate their suffering."

Not doing a proper medical examination on the other hand is irresponsible imo.

None of us living here thought it would be possible either. These irrational procedures, and the fact that the social democrats have repeatedly been stating in no unclear terms that Sweden's biggest problem is the elderly/geriatric demographic "who provide nothing and just cost us a lot of pension money", is why people think the strategy was entirely deliberate.