America's memory of the red scare will eventually disappear but it's gonna be a while.it will eventually catch on and become a more democratic socialist country
Americans have no clue that their issue isn't socialized healthcare, it's fixing your corrupt insurances practices making doctors charge so much. Remove that, and the prices will come down and you'll have best of both worlds instead of this nonsense that Europe has the right idea.
Try getting an actual doctors appointment in Sweden and then compare that to the bill you're actually have paid.
Don't think it's free, and don't think you're being served what you actually paid for.
Other countries do capitalism in healthcare without any of the American issues and it has always worked better than the dream Bernie is selling you and Europeans peddle. Obviously most people don't know better and alternatives, but Europeans get high and mighty out of their nonsense to rub it in Americans even though it's shit, or at least my experience of it.
The only country with the right idea and doesn't actually suck in Europe is Switzerland. Germany, Scandinavian countries, the UK is all a joke in comparison.
That Sweden is a socialist country. Socialism is not the same as Social-Democratic which is what most countries in Europe are. Call it capitalism with a social security net.
If you look at the actual numbers, the northern European countries are actually better at implementing the promises of a democratic capitalist society: Higher median income, higher life expectancy, higher rankings in Happiness indices like the OECD Better Life Index, way higher voting turnout...
If there will be much of America remaining. Over 600k unemployment claims and an infection graph that looks way scarier than Italy where the situation is disastrous, combined with a lack of tests and many people still going to work...
There was a short 2 weeks opportunity window for that to happen, but it didn't happen. The ruling class made sure there will be no disruption in their (healthcare) system.
> The 1918 pandemic ravaged the remote city of Östersund. But its legacy is a city – and country – well-equipped to deal with 21st century challenges
Had they written this 30 years ago this would certainly have been true, Sweden as a nation had heeded Baden Powell's motto "Be Prepared". A large part of this preparation was realised through the unusual but effective way the country had organised its defence which was integrated into most parts of society. The system was called 'Totalförsvaret' (literally 'the total defence') and integrated armed forces, civilian institutions and parts of industry into an organisational structure which was designed to be resistant against the loss of one or more of its arms. There were large stockpiles of material and supplies scattered around the country, these included amongst other 50 mobile field hospitals with 2100 respirators, fully equipped operating theatres, etc. The country had stockpiled food supplies which could last for a maximum of 2 years.
But... nearly all of this was disbanded, given away, thrown away, sold off or demolished in the years after the demise of the Soviet Union. The field hospitals went to the Baltic states, the respirators (new, unused) were given away or thrashed. The food supplies are gone, Sweden has gone from 2 years of supplies to about 16 days, i.e. whatever is in the distributor's warehouses and on the road at the moment.
Before the 90's Sweden had access to about 3600 respirators, now the number seems to be around 520 - seems to be because the "government" has decided this number is critical to the nation's security and as such is not published. The country has the lowest number of hospital beds per capita in the OECD after Portugal.
Maybe SARS2 will help to rebuild this part of the Swedish state? Time will tell.
Maybe 25 years even. (After that, it went downhill fast.)
The defense was truly remarkably in depth and at all levels prepared to continue operations without a remaining chain of command. A Soviet invading force would have of course "won" within weeks, but not before suffering huge losses thanks to always-at-the-ready 200 state of the art fighter bombers using highways all over the country for runways, with a ground crew of only 5 per plane, and a handful of the worlds best (for littoral waters) submarines.
When the coastal artillery would be neutralized, presumably with nukes or speznas, the mobile artillery would retreat inland. The cities were assumed to be nuked, but a large fraction of the city population had underground shelter.
Even with Air and Naval forces depleted, the real struggle for a would be invader would only begin. There were weapons and food stored all over the countryside, and the communicated doctrine was "if you hear about a surrender from anyone, even the prime minister, it's false news. Keep fighting until the country is liberated."
It would have been like Afghanistan, except the insurgents would have had access to better weapons.
All of this had the purpose of deterring the Soviet command from full on ground invasion. Perhaps only nuke the larger cities, destroy some strategic assets and kill the government. In a WW3 scenario, that would have been a win for Sweden.
I wonder what happened with risk awareness. I know many who even at the time thought it was insane to decommission so much of preparedness. Could it have been a generational thing? Or just a huge sigh of relief after the cold war ended? I think risk awareness decreased approximately in the same pace conscription numbers decreased.
Terms such as "the end of history" were popular for a while, so I think a big part of it was a huge sigh of relief after the Cold War. Even during the heyday of the Cold War, some thought defence was futile, some thought it would never be needed at all, so I can imagine that when everything looked alright for a while, cooler/more cynical/hawks didn't have as much sway and the balance shifted.
We are way past it and back to where 50k conscripts should be trained a year again, but I guess everyone is used to lower taxes etc nowadays.
I'm guessing economics happened. Beancounters got into power and all the surplus and redundancy was cut out as a "fat", in the process of becoming "lean" and "just-in-time". It's the same story everywhere.
I really hope, in the future, business schools will forget this "lean" idea of optimality and will again appreciate the value of keeping reserve resources.
The Swedish word for what happened is that the country is 'fredsskadat', i.e. 'damaged by peace'. The country has not seen a major conflict in more than 2 centuries which has created a zeitgeist in which it has left that sort of problems behind it and does not really need to prepare for the eventuality. The narrative goes along these lines: Why spend time and money in preparation for conflict when you can just talk your way out of it? If people just listened to all the reasonable arguments put forward they'll see reason and refrain from whatever nefarious plan they were hatching. The money spent on defence - civil and military - is so much better spent on improving the world at large, in spreading the blessings of the Swedish model abroad. This is not the whole story of course since Sweden does have a sizeable arms industry which exports to all sorts of countries which stray very far from the above narrative.
Conscription into the Swedish army was reinstated a few years ago, conscripts are now being called upon to help managing the SARS2 crisis. Depending on how the country emerges from the crisis there might be a chance of rebuilding part of the total defence system starting with the civil defence aspects.
To a large extent it was realised that the cold war preparedness was collective madness: In retrospect we know that the Soviet leadership in many respect were posturing because they were terrified of a Western first strike. Reagan wrote about his realisation after Able Archer 83 that the Soviets genuinely seemed to think NATO was a threat, rather than see it as a defense; both sides saw it as inconceivable that their side would start a war.
The point being that even at the height of the cold war, the threat was massively overblown, largely because of lack of understanding of how the other side was thinking.
The threat of Russia today is much smaller - for all of Russia's threats to some countries, it is contained to a threat against countries with Russian minorities, and there's no realistic scenario where Russia is suicidal enough to attack an EU country.
And this kind of preparedness was a massive economic drain. Now one can certainly argue that some of the civil defense in terms of field hospitals etc. ought to have been kept up, for a tiny fraction of the cost, and that would be a separate issue.
I grew up in Norway during the cold war, with similar levels of preparedness; air raid siren tests on a regular basis, bomb shelter at our school etc.. The assumption that there was a real threat of invasion was there until Gorbachev, basically, and then it evaporated as the increasing openness and eventual collapse of the Soviet Union showed that the threat assessments throughout the cold war had been completely wrong, and vast amounts of resources that could have gone to e.g. better healthcare had basically been thrown away.
EDIT: This is from Reagans memoirs (taken from [1]), regarding his realisation of the Soviet view of the US:
"Three years had taught me something surprising about the Russians: Many people at the top of the Soviet hierarchy were genuinely afraid of America and Americans. Perhaps this shouldn't have surprised me, but it did...During my first years in Washington, I think many of us in the administration took it for granted that the Russians, like ourselves, considered it unthinkable that the United States would launch a first strike against them. But the more experience I had with Soviet leaders and other heads of state who knew them, the more I began to realize that many Soviet officials feared us not only as adversaries but as potential aggressors who might hurl nuclear weapons at them in a first strike...Well, if that was the case, I was even more anxious to get a top Soviet leader in a room alone and try to convince him we had no designs on the Soviet Union and Russians had nothing to fear from us."
Likewise the West kept posturing on the basis of a belief that the Soviet Union might well decide to attack. The regular air raid siren tests in Norway were not for fun. The regular NATO exercises were not for fun. There was a genuine fear. Only, as it turns out both sides were certain the only party that would be evil enough to strike first was the other side.
It was madness, yet for Sweden and Norway to prepare that way was a local optimum and a rational choice. (Not the only choice, but not a crazy choice.)
Nobody wanted to start a great war, but at least during a couple of incidents things came to close to start by accident. And once started, war takes on a life of its own.
It was a rational choice based on a totally flawed understanding of the other side, is the point. When you believe the other side is out to destroy you, then yes, that is how you respond.
But that belief was driven on both sides by an underlying belief on both sides that they were the good guys and the other side were cartoonish villains.
Neither side questioned the belief that the other side were war mongerers with a crazy willingness to sacrifice to expand, and both sides saw proxy wars as evidence of that while they saw their own involvement as protecting themselves by building alliances and creating buffers.
We see this up to and including Reagan describing the Soviet Union as an "evil empire", only to then get reality thrown in the face by the Soviet response to Able Archer 83 in particular (and I generally have little respect for Reagan, but he does deserve credit for actually coming to that understanding and acting on it in what was one of the biggest foreign policy about faces in modern history).
It was understandable, though, in that both sides had seen the nazis, and both sides saw the nazis as a model for the other side - the Soviets seeing the nazis as not fundamentally different from capitalist imperialists, and the West seeing the Soviets as not fundamentally different from nazi authoritarianism.
But it was nevertheless in retrospect terrifyingly flawed. It stands as one of the biggest foreign policy fuck-ups in human history that the world for half a century was shaped by the two biggest blocks fundamentally misjudging the intentions and motivations of the other side, despite the vast amount of "intelligence" both sides believed they had about each other.
It makes me terrified to think about, because of the implications it has for what stupid mistakes we're probably still perpetuating when we try to infer the motivations of the major powers.
I agree, but also want to add more of the outsider perspective. Norway was part of NATO. Sweden was not. Even if Sweden would have had insight into that both NATO and Soviet had mistaken beliefs about each other, it would still had made sense for Sweden to prepare for total war. If these two sides fought, Sweden better have been prepared.
And there is some indication that Sweden actually had a slightly more nuanced perspective. Olof Palme wanted a nuclear free zone in the Baltic Sea.
This was seen in NATO as a conceit to the Soviets, and maybe the other way around in Soviet command.
I grew up in Hungary during the Cold War, and I can tell you that this is complete hogwash.
The Soviet Union and the U.S. did engage each other in a series of proxy wars. This is not all that surprising: the economic systems of their respective empires were incompatible with that of the other, and in ways that thr existence of one inherently made the other unstable.
In particular, the existence of a rich, relatively-free-market Western Europe, especially West Germany, was absolutely a threat to the Eastern Block: it showed how lousy and untenable the Soviet economic policy was. There was steady movement of people from East to West (prompting the Soviets to build the Iron Curtain lest East Germany find itself with population zero, and to prevent their scientist from publishing in international conferences lest they all defect) and a stream of superior products going from West to East, which made this common knowledge among the population. This made Western Europe a grave, existential threat to the leadership of the Eastern Block. Even if the U.S. had not tried to curtail Soviet expansion elsewhere, this would have made NATO a threat in the sense that it prevented them from solving this problem by ravaging Western Europe using their military might. Such a resolution of the issue would have hurt the U.S., since the Eastern economic system was incomoatible with theirs, and the Atlantic trade was seen as essential for American prosperity. Needless to say, it made sense for them to double down on NATO.
The educated population of the Eastern block understood, and we fully expected the Warsaw Pact to be the one to strike first.
Was the threat assessment of the communist leadership correct? I'd say it was spot on: as society became more open, and as the East started having to rely on CoCom-list products that they couldn't manufacture themselves, itbecame common knowledge that the Eastern economix models have failed, the theatrics became untenable, and eventually the leaders of the Eastern block were deposed, just as they predicted.
> I grew up in Hungary during the Cold War, and I can tell you that this is complete hogwash.
Growing up in Hungary does not give you some magic insight into the views of the Soviet leadership; it's simply irrelevant to the question.
We know from the actual people involved that the Soviet leadership believed a US first strike was not just possible, but likely, and that they had no intentions of being the ones to start a war but were intent to finish it. Just like we know Reagan and many other Western leaders genuinely feared a Soviet first strike and had no intentions of being the ones to start a war but were intent to finish it. Just like we know that people like Reagan were shocked when they realized that the other side was thinking exactly the same way as they were, because both sides - unsurprisingly - were the heroes in their own stories rather than the cartoon villains they both saw the other side as.
This is well documented. It took two years of rapprochement between Reagan and Gorbachev before they started trusting that the other side was not just looking for an upper hand to allow them to attack. Even then Reagan held back on going as far in arms reduction as Gorbachev (who motivated more strongly by the economic devastation trying to keep up militarily with the US caused) was prepared to. It took that much because both sides thought they were doing what was necessary to defend themselves, rather than prepare to attack.
> The Soviet Union and the U.S. did engage each other in a series of proxy wars. This is not all that surprising: the economic systems of their respective empires were incompatible with that of the other, and in ways that thr existence of one inherently made the other unstable.
It's not surprising, and not relevant to the question of whether or not either side was prepared to fight an open war over Europe. The proxy wars were about establishing buffers and alliances out of fear of the other side attacking; exactly out of a fear of open war with the other side. Unfortunately for everyone, both sides saw the other side engaging in this and saw it as evidence of expansionism rather than of fear.
> The educated population of the Eastern block understood, and we fully expected the Warsaw Pact to be the one to strike first.
And yet that expectation shows that the population equally failed to understand the Soviet leaderships motivations.
Up until the early years of Stalin, the idea of Soviet expansionism might have held some validity; even perhaps a decade or so after "Socialism in One Country" became policy in 1925 there might have been reason to fear that it was a temporary change to regroup. But not beyond that. Even Soviet involvement in Eastern Europe was about creating a buffer to account for Soviet fear of the West.
You're accounting for it by seeing yourself as part of an expansionist empire. But you were not. You were outsiders; convenient pawns creating a buffer for a terrified leadership with a bunker mentality that saw the Soviet Union itself as what mattered.
> Growing up in Hungary does not give you some magic insight into the views of the Soviet leadership; it's simply irrelevant to the question.
No, not really. My claims are not based on my "credentials" as someone who grew up in the Eastern Block, just as yours aren't based on growing up in Norway during the cold war.
> We know from the actual people involved that the Soviet leadership believed a US first strike was not just possible, but likely, and that they had no intentions of being the ones to start a war but were intent to finish it.
This is indeed well-studied. We know from the documents and testimonies released by actual people involved with the Warsaw Pact armies (e.g. Gen. Szucs [3], who was head of Hungarian military intelligence between 1957 and 1989), as well as from documents leaked from Voroshilov Academy, what the actual Soviet battle plans were and what they assumed. There's extensive Hungarian literature on Soviet war plans during the sixties, seventies and beyond (in the off-chance that whoever sees this can read Hungarian, some good starting points on the subject are article [1] and book [2]).
Apart from this direct evidence, we have plenty of indirect evidence of Soviet intentions. Just an example: the known Soviet war plans never consider Austria's neutrality (Vienna being a major target of Hungarian forces), but all of them assume that NATO forces would not be present there when the war breaks out. This does not make sense unless they assume a WP first strike: Soviet intelligence plans are known to have considered NATO forces violating Austria's territory to be the most reliable predictor of an imminent NATO first strike.
> It's not surprising, and not relevant to the question of whether or not either side was prepared to fight an open war over Europe.
The proxy wars were part of the general political situation: there is no reason to dismiss them as irrelevant to the question of war in Europe.
Again, the destabilizing effects of an affluent market-liberal Western Europe on the Soviet Union are well-understood, and outlined in my previous comment. Subjugating WE was a natural geopolitical goal for the Soviet Union, and one we have overwhelming evidence they actively pursued.
> even perhaps a decade or so after "Socialism in One Country" became policy in 1925 there might have been reason to fear that it was a temporary change to regroup
Interesting. You conveniently forget about that part when Stalin conspired with the Nazis to get rid of the buffer zone between their respective empires and greatly expand their respective territories.
> convenient pawns creating a buffer for a terrified leadership with a bunker mentality that saw the Soviet Union itself as what mattered.
Portraying the Soviet Union as a victim of Imperialist aggression, playing the "help, we're being surrounded" card, etc. has always been a staple of the Soviet (and now modern Russian) propaganda playbook (as outlined in [4], an actual textbook in used in the legal successor to the Soviet Union's Voroshilov Academy) intended to prevent the world's public opinion from uniting against them.
The SU maintained an extensive spy network all across Europe and the U.S. (remember that time when they stole the secrets of the U.S. nuclear weapons program, and then did it again with the thermonuclear weapons program?); they knew U.S. society and understood American geopolitcal goals really well. One would have to be extremely gullible to think that the Cold War was a misunderstanding on their part. It's not just contrary to evidence, but would not be realistic at all even if we had good evidence for it (which we don't): sorta how you wouldn't conclude that the Sun exploded just because one detector said so [5].
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As an aside, let me note that "heroes in their own stories seeing the other as cartoon villains" is an incredibly poor model of states and governments; states tend not to make that kind of m...
Absolutely agree. Even now you see Sweden is still terrified of Russia, while Russia, I am sorry to say, couldn't care less about Sweden! They have China and the US pointing guns at them!! Sweden is certainly one of the last things in their minds... and there's absolutely no other possible threat to Sweden security that comes even close to this imaginary one (maybe the USA would be that, given its recent history of unstable behavior and alienation of European countries - even suggesting in a nearly threatening tone to buy Greenland from another Nordic country, Denmark). To see people in this thread lamenting that the "preparedness" of an earlier time (i.e. readiness and willingness to fight a war) has been lost makes me sad, to be honest. Russia is a state that could do with some friends, and Sweden, being in such a good standing on the world stage, could be a great help to slowly introduce the Russians to the same side of the table, even if it doesn't agree with every policy from the Russians, but that of course will not happen... and I'm afraid that's not because the Russians are not willing to start discussions, it's unfortunately the Swedish side, and NATO, who are unlikely to do it due to this disproportionate fear that exists deep in their consciousness.
It didn't care much back then either, except that Sweden was completely surrounded by NATO on one side, and the Soviet realm on the other. To get to Norway in time you'd have to go through Sweden. To control the Baltic Sea you would have to take the island of Gotland, or at least make sure the other side is denied Gotland.
Our defence was just to avoid being caught between a rock and hard place. The idea of not joining NATO was that standing outside of it, we had at least a slim chance of avoid being dragged into the bulk of the NATO - Soviet theatre of war. AS NATO members we would have been hit by default.
How can any of this be hard to understand? Especially against the backdrop of World War 2 being in living memory, and that being neutral worked then. Just barely and from luck, bravery and evil in an even mix, but it did work.
It's not in the strategic interest of Sweden even today to let Russia play divide and conquer. NordStream is such an attempt by Russia to divide Europe, and Sweden has protested, weakly. Russia does not care, of course. Nobody expected it will.
>But... nearly all of this was disbanded, given away, thrown away, sold off or demolished in the years after the demise of the Soviet Union.
This hollowing out seems to be true across much of the US and Western world. Once the threat of the Soviet Union was removed, the US lost it’s ability to defend it’s own society with equivalent state power. While the slashing and privatization of essential services was lauded by both parties, it seems that this might turn out to have been extreme shortsightedness.
> Sweden has gone from 2 years of supplies to about 16 days, i.e. whatever is in the distributor's warehouses and on the road at the moment.
Funny thing is, some people call this lean market-based optimization "efficient".
Nature happens to have a different definition. If you can only survive and operate at peak capacity during regular conditions, and are destroyed during a crisis, there's nothing efficient about that.
The title is basically clickbait; there is no link mentioned between the Spanish Flu and Sweden's welfare state except both happened in Sweden in the last ~100 years.
I suspect they aren't linked. Societies have generally changed a lot in the past 100 years. Pre- and Post- WWI Europe are different beasts.
"As the epidemic raged in late August, when around 20 people were dying daily, the city’s bank director Carl Lignell withdrew funds from Stockholm without authorisation and requisitioned a school for use as a hospital (the city didn’t have one). "
..
"“What is interesting is that, after the epidemic, the state dropped investigations against Lignell and made tentative steps towards a cooperative approach to social reform. Issues such as poor nutrition and housing were on the political agenda,” says Hedlund. Anyone trying to date the inception of Sweden’s welfare state cannot overlook the events of autumn 1918."
You can argue about the causality but it's not clickbait in the sense that it interviews a local expert who is making a case that it was a significant factor.
There is a short but rather tumultuous time between 1918 and 2020 where a few minor things happened like the rise of communism, the widespread use of oil and the EU.
The article establishes that people cared about poor people in 1918 and in 2020. The article is evidence, theory and anecdote lite about the links.
The October Revolution was in 1917. I bet that was more influential than the Spanish Flu. Communism was fresh, young and not been discredited and exposed as an ideology of bloodthirsty monsters. I'd pick that as a genesis point.
More that one should ask "which one?" - in 1918 the ideology of bloodthirsty monsters was whatever was responsible for the war. Monarchial nationalism? Colonialism? Leopold II of Belgium was almost as much of a mass murderer as Stalin.
"Social inequality in the city meant the Spanish flu hit all the harder."
That is another statement without any support, like the entire article. It is not clickbait, it's propaganda.
I don't find it offensive (it is not), I find it untrue and unsupported.
Social inequality does not make a pandemic to hit harder, for example the lack of rich people (reduced inequality) would not decrease the rate of infection of the rest of the population. A city with all poor people (low inequality) would probably be hit even harder, so the living conditions are a factor at amplifying the effect of a pandemic, inequality is not. Inequality in theory slightly reduces the hit if you assume the rich will better take care of themselves.
I'm living in Sweden at the moment (am Dutch myself) and am quite disappointed with the response to the crisis. I live in a shared house (12 people) and many are still going to work as normal. One works in social services and sees dozens of asylum seekers every day, she has gotten very little guidance and there has been very little action in terms of prevention even though they have had people getting sick with COVID-19 already. Others are on paid leave now but it doesn't seem consistent across the board. The speech of the prime minister yesterday was very mild, basically just counting on citizens' personal responsibility.
Not that I think the Netherlands is doing much better though. Overall I think it's very frustrating to see the extremely slow response in both Europe and the US after seeing multiple countries deal with the pandemic more or less successfully.
What do you think of the Belgian situation (closed borders, quarantine and generalized confinement) ? We are closing our borders and heavy fines are thrown around (4000€ for crossing the border) but it seems the Netherlands aren't going hard enough for the moment.
I can't say that I've followed what's going on in Belgium but I think that at the moment that's probably the wise thing to do. It sucks but even starting a lockdown right now the number of cases in ICU is likely to grow by more than 10 times over the next 2 weeks or so.
It would be great if we could count on personal responsibility - in theory we should be able to go out and bike/hike without interacting with any people and avoid total imprisonment that way. But it doesn't look like that's working, people are still gathering and socializing quite a lot. Most people are just not aware of the urgency and don't fear for their own health, thereby discounting other people's health. Even this lack of personal fear is probably unjustified by now - by the time they'll get sick the hospital system will be overwhelmed.
> Most people are just not aware of the urgency and don't fear for their own health, thereby discounting other people's health. Even this lack of personal fear is probably unjustified by now - by the time they'll get sick the hospital system will be overwhelmed.
This is really problematic. It looks like outliers know-it-all could be ruining it for the rest of us.
I wonder if governments could use a heavy hammer and broadcast 24/24 (or at random) footages from Italian hospitals.
You know what South Korea and Singapore did in December? They took photos of students in lectures, and used that for contact tracing.
Also they keep track of where people enter and exit public transportation by tapping in and out of the gateways.
They used that information in order to figure out where people have been and what train they have taken in order to disinfect and map people.
Basically, only countries like South Korea, China and Singapore had a chance.
The latter country even started producing their own n95 masks and distributed to their population with disinfectant while Swedish government propaganda machinery started saying "masks" are useless, very much like that did in the US.
Til this day, you can't get n95 masks in Sweden.
Basically only "police states" had chances to keep their numbers from growing.
In the early days, Sweden would test every day and have 30% to 100% growth in new cases every day until they decided to re-evaluate how to test, now they got 8% and 6% new cases every week.
Obviously they're full of shit about testing, but they really never had any chance.
Honestly, only countries with where the police can actually solve crimes (assault, burglary, robbery) had a chance.
Sweden can't handle the amount of crimes it has, cops shut down cases on a daily basis with the excuse "it happens all the time" - heard it twice ourselves.
In a country where they can't handle weekly bombings and shootings, they really had no chance with a disease that lacks central leadership and lives off the land.
How the hell would they? There is a distinct resolve and grit that is inherently lacking amongst their people.
It's hard work, takes a lot of effort and offers very little reward. So it makes sense that the public sector in Sweden, or most of Europe for that matter has no ability to actually deal with this.
Also, good luck if you need health care in Sweden, even before Covid, you had to wait a few months, two in my case, to actually seeing a doctor who will pretend to help you. But what choice do you have, you had already paid for that doctor... tsk tsk.
Things are different in Asia where "giving up" wouldn't look good, but it's acceptable in Sweden. Anything else is Russian propaganda... obviously.
That's true and I think it's irresponsible. Even if the spread would be perfectly controlled and kept so that the number of patients in ICU stay below capacity, I don't think we can manage to get 60% of the population infected in 12 months because we would be moving at a slower rate. And it would be very surprising if the spread can be perfectly controlled. This article also makes some very good arguments for why it's not the right strategy: https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-the-hammer-and-th...
Thanks for article. It really seems the strategy behind Sweden’s decision is to allow old people to get infected to they can use the health care system before it floods. As you said, one cannot really control how the spread among 60% of population goes, for this amount of time. This will cost lives, specially of old ones.
They haven't gotten out and outright said it, but you are correct since every action or particular lack of points to it.
I think the saw the bad PR UK got, and decided it's better to keep silent about it. Shady, but smart. They have to massage that Sweden image any way they can.
Yes, this is just based on actions/decisions. It is even trickier since population seems to have accepted it very well. Life in Stockholm and other cities seems rather normal when compared to other countries. Bars, pubs, and elementary schools are still opened.
Yesterday prime minister gave a national speech. He didn’t say anything new, except “more lives of loved ones might be lost, and we should prepare and take responsibility to avoid that”. Nothing really new.
Strange, I always thought that welfare state enabler were natural resources (like iron ore), the fact they had made through the II World War untouched and hard work of the post-war generation.
The association between the flu and that what happened 30-40 years later sounds a little bit like a click bait.
This is an article about the city of Östersund written in 2018, the few links between the Spanish flu and any reform are tenuous at best.
Having said that, I grew up in Östersund and found the article fascinating and a good read.
One interesting thing is that now, a 100 years later, the tourism of the region once again brings a pandemic. Swedens largest ski resort Åre, an hour west of Östersund, has a bunch of Covid-19 cases that has spread through after ski parties (which has since stopped).
Some context to the article not relating to Covid-19:
Jämtland, the region where Östersund is located, is located in the geographic middle of Sweden, but is considered to be in the northern parts because the demographic of the country is heavily skewed south. In the west it borders Norway and in 1563–1677 it switched between being part of Denmark/Norway and Sweden 13(!) times. Perhaps as a result of this there is still a strong sense of regional identity. Among other things Jämtland is a "fake republic" with a "fake president" which gives a speech during the music festival once a year. This is just in good fun and the speech is mostly about peace, love and understanding, but hearing 15k people singing the regional anthem "Jämtlandssången" after the speech always gives me goosebumps.
Östersund has always been strategically important militarily, in semi-recent times because the Soviet Union would have to pass it to take Trondheim in Norway and the harbor there. The article mentions the airbase closing down, but there were other military units that were disbanded as well. The article touches on this mentioning the university, but another reason the town is still successful today is that it also supported newly unemployed military personel in starting companies. Since one of the units that were disbanded(/moved?) was the military technical school, the city managed to keep a bunch of people with higher education which might otherwise have relocated and now has a few tech-companies and a somewhat entrepreneurial spirit.
This is just some stream of consciousness stuff, while I live in Stockholm now I got excited "my city" was featured on HN. :)
It is a beautiful city and region with fantastic nature and a very long and fascinating history, definitely visit it if you have the opportunity!
Our government was extremely slow to act and didn't shut down anything which let the COVID-19 virus spread rapidly in Sweden and now we have an uncontrolled spread with no testing except for the groups at risk.
The article is basically clickbait, Sweden has one of the lowest amounts of hospital beds and respirators per capita in EU.
We have much fewer ICU-spots than Italy, lower hospital beds etc so we will certainly have a worse time than Italy if we cannot contain the spread somewhat.
The government still hasn't imposed a lot of restrictions compared to other countries. If this is good or bad, will be determined in the future.
I think that Sweden is regarded as a country with good healthcare quality. The problem here is that western governments thought misleadingly that they were safe because their healthcare systems ranked high in a number of rankings. But here we face what really is a quantitative problem, not a qualitative problem. We can provide good care at an individual level, and the virus is often benign at the individual level. It really becomes a quantitative problem and we are on the exponential phase of the epidemic.
No, Sweden was considered a country with a good healthcare system under the former socialist governments. But now that the capitalists are ruling Sweden and Denmark, the ship turned towards the US and UK systems. With its known problems.
Their healthcare system is now the 2nd worst in the EU. Social problems are rising right and left.
> Their healthcare system is now the 2nd worst in the EU
WHAT? Now I haven't been to every European country, probably around 30% of them, would be my guess. But literally the country with the best healthcare system of them all, that I've visited a hospital in, have been Sweden.
You got any numbers to backup this claim? Spain, Italy and Greece clearly have a worse healthcare system, and those are just three examples I can think of quickly. Surely lots of countries in eastern europe has it worse than Sweden.
One source showing the opposite of what you're saying:
> Sweden is ranked third by the Commonwealth Fund, with a high proportion of doctors, above-average healthcare spending, and relatively low prescriptions of drugs.
> Spain, Italy and Greece clearly have a worse healthcare system, and those are just three examples I can think of quickly. Surely lots of countries in eastern europe has it worse than Sweden.
Spain has one of the best healthcare systems in the world, usually ranked by the WHO within the top 10 while Sweden's was within top 30.
Both Spain and Sweden seems to be about equal if you average the rankings in that list. So surely if Spain has one of the best healthcare systems in the world, Sweden is pretty equal, then Sweden is nowhere near being the "2nd worst in the EU" when it comes to healthcare.
Since I wasn't the one making the original claim, I could only try my best to find the matching source, this is as close as I could get. Sorry about that.
All health systems in Europe are starved of funding. I live I Austria and every year the health insurance covers less and less requireing you to fork more non life threatening stuff out of your own pocket. This is due in some part to an ever increasing aging population needing expensive care and lower tax income due to slower economic growth.
Doesn't matter how starved the systems are. They're still top notch compared to most of the rest of the world. I know it's hard to see and understand this until you end up in one of the many countries where the health system is in reality non-existent, or worse, incompetent.
But which one? The US and the UK healthcare systems are polar opposites. US is entirely privatised with many gaps in coverage, and it's the most expensive healthcare system in the world. The UK (despite its general conservativeness) has an entirely socialised system that's the cheapest in Europe.
Also Swede here. I have high hopes that the decision to not yet close elementary schools will have been the right choice, for now. Time will tell though and the whole thing is very unsettling.
But yes, Sweden handled this ineptly. People were coming home from hot spots in Italy - they were not tested, not told to self quarantine, anything. That's just plain stupid and slow, there's no excuse for that.
Yes shutting down elementary schools for children that needs parental supervision is probably a bad idea since that leads to the need of a parent at home.
Parents who otherwise would be working at hospitals or other important features of a society. But there has been a lot of other options that just passed as you mention.
Restrictions in Italy have been continuously yanked up as the situation became worse and worse. I hope the same isn't going to happen in Sweden, but wouldn't count on it. Stay safe.
Swede here aswell. The government, which follows our public health authority's recommendations, have in my opinion taken many appropriate decisions regarding the spread.
Since it is a pandemic, the spread of the virus is inevitable. If we would quarantine whole cities too early, or take other measures too early, it would just hurt us economically and push the problem forward. It's all about all about timing now and flattening the curve, which we have under control at the moment.
I am proud of our government taking decisions based on the public health authority's recommendations which are based on science. Compared to some other countries who take decisions not based on science (e.g. Denmark closing it's borders at the time was not recommended by their public health authority).
Yes I'm relieved to see what I consider a level headed response. I hope that I am right and we will of course see. I remember reading a quote from our "public health authority guy" something like "it's obvious that other countries decisions are based on politics, not science". That's a pretty brave thing to say, the easy decision would have been to follow along and close everything.
I am of the very unpopular opinion that all people actually die, that quality of life is the only thing that trumps life, and that we have to bring these things into the equation at some level. Now some people read this and immediately think that I suggest that we do nothing and let everyone die, but no I just want us to consider all sides of the equation thoroughly.
Ah, once sweden was a good country. We wanted to be the best at everything, calculation, sports, creativity, you name it!
Then we got it into our head that we wanted to be the best at being worst, so here we are, rape capital, injustice capital. Naive, virtue signaling, pretentious assholes.
Still some of the old guard though. Not all out of the game yet as you can see of how much tech we still produce.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 139 ms ] threadWhat a pithy comment. I guess that ends the debate before it even starts.
Except that every other Western nation has socialized medicine, and most of their citizens are happy with it.
I hope your grocery cashier doesn't have corona virus this week, because they aren't checking into a US hospital.
Don't fall for the false promises capitalism makes.
We have tens of millions of Americans who can't afford the ambulance ride to the hospital, let alone the stay there for even one day.
And we probably spend as much on administrative and billing overhead for health care as other countries spend on services. Think about that.
Try getting an actual doctors appointment in Sweden and then compare that to the bill you're actually have paid. Don't think it's free, and don't think you're being served what you actually paid for.
Other countries do capitalism in healthcare without any of the American issues and it has always worked better than the dream Bernie is selling you and Europeans peddle. Obviously most people don't know better and alternatives, but Europeans get high and mighty out of their nonsense to rub it in Americans even though it's shit, or at least my experience of it.
The only country with the right idea and doesn't actually suck in Europe is Switzerland. Germany, Scandinavian countries, the UK is all a joke in comparison.
They get super rich in the good times, and then gets bailed out for their mistakes in the bad times.
But for the rest of us, it’s the dog-eat-dog world of crony capitalism. Welcome to America! You’ll love it here. Btw, try not to get sick.
I live in a social democratic country and will gladly answer any uncertainties you might have.
Edit: Not sure why I am being downvoted. I was genuinely curious.
Had they written this 30 years ago this would certainly have been true, Sweden as a nation had heeded Baden Powell's motto "Be Prepared". A large part of this preparation was realised through the unusual but effective way the country had organised its defence which was integrated into most parts of society. The system was called 'Totalförsvaret' (literally 'the total defence') and integrated armed forces, civilian institutions and parts of industry into an organisational structure which was designed to be resistant against the loss of one or more of its arms. There were large stockpiles of material and supplies scattered around the country, these included amongst other 50 mobile field hospitals with 2100 respirators, fully equipped operating theatres, etc. The country had stockpiled food supplies which could last for a maximum of 2 years.
But... nearly all of this was disbanded, given away, thrown away, sold off or demolished in the years after the demise of the Soviet Union. The field hospitals went to the Baltic states, the respirators (new, unused) were given away or thrashed. The food supplies are gone, Sweden has gone from 2 years of supplies to about 16 days, i.e. whatever is in the distributor's warehouses and on the road at the moment.
Before the 90's Sweden had access to about 3600 respirators, now the number seems to be around 520 - seems to be because the "government" has decided this number is critical to the nation's security and as such is not published. The country has the lowest number of hospital beds per capita in the OECD after Portugal.
Maybe SARS2 will help to rebuild this part of the Swedish state? Time will tell.
The defense was truly remarkably in depth and at all levels prepared to continue operations without a remaining chain of command. A Soviet invading force would have of course "won" within weeks, but not before suffering huge losses thanks to always-at-the-ready 200 state of the art fighter bombers using highways all over the country for runways, with a ground crew of only 5 per plane, and a handful of the worlds best (for littoral waters) submarines.
When the coastal artillery would be neutralized, presumably with nukes or speznas, the mobile artillery would retreat inland. The cities were assumed to be nuked, but a large fraction of the city population had underground shelter.
Even with Air and Naval forces depleted, the real struggle for a would be invader would only begin. There were weapons and food stored all over the countryside, and the communicated doctrine was "if you hear about a surrender from anyone, even the prime minister, it's false news. Keep fighting until the country is liberated."
It would have been like Afghanistan, except the insurgents would have had access to better weapons.
All of this had the purpose of deterring the Soviet command from full on ground invasion. Perhaps only nuke the larger cities, destroy some strategic assets and kill the government. In a WW3 scenario, that would have been a win for Sweden.
1980: 50 980 new conscripts trained
1986: 45 572
1990: 41 349
2000: 16 658
2005: 10 169
2008: 6 804
2010: conscription paused
https://www.forsvarsmakten.se/sv/information-och-fakta/var-h...
We are way past it and back to where 50k conscripts should be trained a year again, but I guess everyone is used to lower taxes etc nowadays.
Conscription into the Swedish army was reinstated a few years ago, conscripts are now being called upon to help managing the SARS2 crisis. Depending on how the country emerges from the crisis there might be a chance of rebuilding part of the total defence system starting with the civil defence aspects.
The point being that even at the height of the cold war, the threat was massively overblown, largely because of lack of understanding of how the other side was thinking.
The threat of Russia today is much smaller - for all of Russia's threats to some countries, it is contained to a threat against countries with Russian minorities, and there's no realistic scenario where Russia is suicidal enough to attack an EU country.
And this kind of preparedness was a massive economic drain. Now one can certainly argue that some of the civil defense in terms of field hospitals etc. ought to have been kept up, for a tiny fraction of the cost, and that would be a separate issue.
I grew up in Norway during the cold war, with similar levels of preparedness; air raid siren tests on a regular basis, bomb shelter at our school etc.. The assumption that there was a real threat of invasion was there until Gorbachev, basically, and then it evaporated as the increasing openness and eventual collapse of the Soviet Union showed that the threat assessments throughout the cold war had been completely wrong, and vast amounts of resources that could have gone to e.g. better healthcare had basically been thrown away.
EDIT: This is from Reagans memoirs (taken from [1]), regarding his realisation of the Soviet view of the US:
"Three years had taught me something surprising about the Russians: Many people at the top of the Soviet hierarchy were genuinely afraid of America and Americans. Perhaps this shouldn't have surprised me, but it did...During my first years in Washington, I think many of us in the administration took it for granted that the Russians, like ourselves, considered it unthinkable that the United States would launch a first strike against them. But the more experience I had with Soviet leaders and other heads of state who knew them, the more I began to realize that many Soviet officials feared us not only as adversaries but as potential aggressors who might hurl nuclear weapons at them in a first strike...Well, if that was the case, I was even more anxious to get a top Soviet leader in a room alone and try to convince him we had no designs on the Soviet Union and Russians had nothing to fear from us."
Likewise the West kept posturing on the basis of a belief that the Soviet Union might well decide to attack. The regular air raid siren tests in Norway were not for fun. The regular NATO exercises were not for fun. There was a genuine fear. Only, as it turns out both sides were certain the only party that would be evil enough to strike first was the other side.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83#American_reacti...
Nobody wanted to start a great war, but at least during a couple of incidents things came to close to start by accident. And once started, war takes on a life of its own.
But that belief was driven on both sides by an underlying belief on both sides that they were the good guys and the other side were cartoonish villains.
Neither side questioned the belief that the other side were war mongerers with a crazy willingness to sacrifice to expand, and both sides saw proxy wars as evidence of that while they saw their own involvement as protecting themselves by building alliances and creating buffers.
We see this up to and including Reagan describing the Soviet Union as an "evil empire", only to then get reality thrown in the face by the Soviet response to Able Archer 83 in particular (and I generally have little respect for Reagan, but he does deserve credit for actually coming to that understanding and acting on it in what was one of the biggest foreign policy about faces in modern history).
It was understandable, though, in that both sides had seen the nazis, and both sides saw the nazis as a model for the other side - the Soviets seeing the nazis as not fundamentally different from capitalist imperialists, and the West seeing the Soviets as not fundamentally different from nazi authoritarianism.
But it was nevertheless in retrospect terrifyingly flawed. It stands as one of the biggest foreign policy fuck-ups in human history that the world for half a century was shaped by the two biggest blocks fundamentally misjudging the intentions and motivations of the other side, despite the vast amount of "intelligence" both sides believed they had about each other.
It makes me terrified to think about, because of the implications it has for what stupid mistakes we're probably still perpetuating when we try to infer the motivations of the major powers.
And there is some indication that Sweden actually had a slightly more nuanced perspective. Olof Palme wanted a nuclear free zone in the Baltic Sea.
This was seen in NATO as a conceit to the Soviets, and maybe the other way around in Soviet command.
The Soviet Union and the U.S. did engage each other in a series of proxy wars. This is not all that surprising: the economic systems of their respective empires were incompatible with that of the other, and in ways that thr existence of one inherently made the other unstable.
In particular, the existence of a rich, relatively-free-market Western Europe, especially West Germany, was absolutely a threat to the Eastern Block: it showed how lousy and untenable the Soviet economic policy was. There was steady movement of people from East to West (prompting the Soviets to build the Iron Curtain lest East Germany find itself with population zero, and to prevent their scientist from publishing in international conferences lest they all defect) and a stream of superior products going from West to East, which made this common knowledge among the population. This made Western Europe a grave, existential threat to the leadership of the Eastern Block. Even if the U.S. had not tried to curtail Soviet expansion elsewhere, this would have made NATO a threat in the sense that it prevented them from solving this problem by ravaging Western Europe using their military might. Such a resolution of the issue would have hurt the U.S., since the Eastern economic system was incomoatible with theirs, and the Atlantic trade was seen as essential for American prosperity. Needless to say, it made sense for them to double down on NATO.
The educated population of the Eastern block understood, and we fully expected the Warsaw Pact to be the one to strike first.
Was the threat assessment of the communist leadership correct? I'd say it was spot on: as society became more open, and as the East started having to rely on CoCom-list products that they couldn't manufacture themselves, itbecame common knowledge that the Eastern economix models have failed, the theatrics became untenable, and eventually the leaders of the Eastern block were deposed, just as they predicted.
Growing up in Hungary does not give you some magic insight into the views of the Soviet leadership; it's simply irrelevant to the question.
We know from the actual people involved that the Soviet leadership believed a US first strike was not just possible, but likely, and that they had no intentions of being the ones to start a war but were intent to finish it. Just like we know Reagan and many other Western leaders genuinely feared a Soviet first strike and had no intentions of being the ones to start a war but were intent to finish it. Just like we know that people like Reagan were shocked when they realized that the other side was thinking exactly the same way as they were, because both sides - unsurprisingly - were the heroes in their own stories rather than the cartoon villains they both saw the other side as.
This is well documented. It took two years of rapprochement between Reagan and Gorbachev before they started trusting that the other side was not just looking for an upper hand to allow them to attack. Even then Reagan held back on going as far in arms reduction as Gorbachev (who motivated more strongly by the economic devastation trying to keep up militarily with the US caused) was prepared to. It took that much because both sides thought they were doing what was necessary to defend themselves, rather than prepare to attack.
> The Soviet Union and the U.S. did engage each other in a series of proxy wars. This is not all that surprising: the economic systems of their respective empires were incompatible with that of the other, and in ways that thr existence of one inherently made the other unstable.
It's not surprising, and not relevant to the question of whether or not either side was prepared to fight an open war over Europe. The proxy wars were about establishing buffers and alliances out of fear of the other side attacking; exactly out of a fear of open war with the other side. Unfortunately for everyone, both sides saw the other side engaging in this and saw it as evidence of expansionism rather than of fear.
> The educated population of the Eastern block understood, and we fully expected the Warsaw Pact to be the one to strike first.
And yet that expectation shows that the population equally failed to understand the Soviet leaderships motivations.
Up until the early years of Stalin, the idea of Soviet expansionism might have held some validity; even perhaps a decade or so after "Socialism in One Country" became policy in 1925 there might have been reason to fear that it was a temporary change to regroup. But not beyond that. Even Soviet involvement in Eastern Europe was about creating a buffer to account for Soviet fear of the West.
You're accounting for it by seeing yourself as part of an expansionist empire. But you were not. You were outsiders; convenient pawns creating a buffer for a terrified leadership with a bunker mentality that saw the Soviet Union itself as what mattered.
No, not really. My claims are not based on my "credentials" as someone who grew up in the Eastern Block, just as yours aren't based on growing up in Norway during the cold war.
> We know from the actual people involved that the Soviet leadership believed a US first strike was not just possible, but likely, and that they had no intentions of being the ones to start a war but were intent to finish it.
This is indeed well-studied. We know from the documents and testimonies released by actual people involved with the Warsaw Pact armies (e.g. Gen. Szucs [3], who was head of Hungarian military intelligence between 1957 and 1989), as well as from documents leaked from Voroshilov Academy, what the actual Soviet battle plans were and what they assumed. There's extensive Hungarian literature on Soviet war plans during the sixties, seventies and beyond (in the off-chance that whoever sees this can read Hungarian, some good starting points on the subject are article [1] and book [2]).
Apart from this direct evidence, we have plenty of indirect evidence of Soviet intentions. Just an example: the known Soviet war plans never consider Austria's neutrality (Vienna being a major target of Hungarian forces), but all of them assume that NATO forces would not be present there when the war breaks out. This does not make sense unless they assume a WP first strike: Soviet intelligence plans are known to have considered NATO forces violating Austria's territory to be the most reliable predictor of an imminent NATO first strike.
> It's not surprising, and not relevant to the question of whether or not either side was prepared to fight an open war over Europe.
The proxy wars were part of the general political situation: there is no reason to dismiss them as irrelevant to the question of war in Europe.
Again, the destabilizing effects of an affluent market-liberal Western Europe on the Soviet Union are well-understood, and outlined in my previous comment. Subjugating WE was a natural geopolitical goal for the Soviet Union, and one we have overwhelming evidence they actively pursued.
> even perhaps a decade or so after "Socialism in One Country" became policy in 1925 there might have been reason to fear that it was a temporary change to regroup
Interesting. You conveniently forget about that part when Stalin conspired with the Nazis to get rid of the buffer zone between their respective empires and greatly expand their respective territories.
> convenient pawns creating a buffer for a terrified leadership with a bunker mentality that saw the Soviet Union itself as what mattered.
Portraying the Soviet Union as a victim of Imperialist aggression, playing the "help, we're being surrounded" card, etc. has always been a staple of the Soviet (and now modern Russian) propaganda playbook (as outlined in [4], an actual textbook in used in the legal successor to the Soviet Union's Voroshilov Academy) intended to prevent the world's public opinion from uniting against them.
The SU maintained an extensive spy network all across Europe and the U.S. (remember that time when they stole the secrets of the U.S. nuclear weapons program, and then did it again with the thermonuclear weapons program?); they knew U.S. society and understood American geopolitcal goals really well. One would have to be extremely gullible to think that the Cold War was a misunderstanding on their part. It's not just contrary to evidence, but would not be realistic at all even if we had good evidence for it (which we don't): sorta how you wouldn't conclude that the Sun exploded just because one detector said so [5].
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As an aside, let me note that "heroes in their own stories seeing the other as cartoon villains" is an incredibly poor model of states and governments; states tend not to make that kind of m...
It didn't care much back then either, except that Sweden was completely surrounded by NATO on one side, and the Soviet realm on the other. To get to Norway in time you'd have to go through Sweden. To control the Baltic Sea you would have to take the island of Gotland, or at least make sure the other side is denied Gotland.
Our defence was just to avoid being caught between a rock and hard place. The idea of not joining NATO was that standing outside of it, we had at least a slim chance of avoid being dragged into the bulk of the NATO - Soviet theatre of war. AS NATO members we would have been hit by default.
How can any of this be hard to understand? Especially against the backdrop of World War 2 being in living memory, and that being neutral worked then. Just barely and from luck, bravery and evil in an even mix, but it did work.
It's not in the strategic interest of Sweden even today to let Russia play divide and conquer. NordStream is such an attempt by Russia to divide Europe, and Sweden has protested, weakly. Russia does not care, of course. Nobody expected it will.
This hollowing out seems to be true across much of the US and Western world. Once the threat of the Soviet Union was removed, the US lost it’s ability to defend it’s own society with equivalent state power. While the slashing and privatization of essential services was lauded by both parties, it seems that this might turn out to have been extreme shortsightedness.
Funny thing is, some people call this lean market-based optimization "efficient".
Nature happens to have a different definition. If you can only survive and operate at peak capacity during regular conditions, and are destroyed during a crisis, there's nothing efficient about that.
I suspect they aren't linked. Societies have generally changed a lot in the past 100 years. Pre- and Post- WWI Europe are different beasts.
"As the epidemic raged in late August, when around 20 people were dying daily, the city’s bank director Carl Lignell withdrew funds from Stockholm without authorisation and requisitioned a school for use as a hospital (the city didn’t have one). "
..
"“What is interesting is that, after the epidemic, the state dropped investigations against Lignell and made tentative steps towards a cooperative approach to social reform. Issues such as poor nutrition and housing were on the political agenda,” says Hedlund. Anyone trying to date the inception of Sweden’s welfare state cannot overlook the events of autumn 1918."
You can argue about the causality but it's not clickbait in the sense that it interviews a local expert who is making a case that it was a significant factor.
The article establishes that people cared about poor people in 1918 and in 2020. The article is evidence, theory and anecdote lite about the links.
The October Revolution was in 1917. I bet that was more influential than the Spanish Flu. Communism was fresh, young and not been discredited and exposed as an ideology of bloodthirsty monsters. I'd pick that as a genesis point.
I'm not sure this is a fair reading of history.
Do you mean to suggest rich people are always hit as hard as poor people?
Social inequality does not make a pandemic to hit harder, for example the lack of rich people (reduced inequality) would not decrease the rate of infection of the rest of the population. A city with all poor people (low inequality) would probably be hit even harder, so the living conditions are a factor at amplifying the effect of a pandemic, inequality is not. Inequality in theory slightly reduces the hit if you assume the rich will better take care of themselves.
Not that I think the Netherlands is doing much better though. Overall I think it's very frustrating to see the extremely slow response in both Europe and the US after seeing multiple countries deal with the pandemic more or less successfully.
Sweden seem to be prioritizing the economy heavily.
Comparing the two responses is going to be interesting once this all blows over
It would be great if we could count on personal responsibility - in theory we should be able to go out and bike/hike without interacting with any people and avoid total imprisonment that way. But it doesn't look like that's working, people are still gathering and socializing quite a lot. Most people are just not aware of the urgency and don't fear for their own health, thereby discounting other people's health. Even this lack of personal fear is probably unjustified by now - by the time they'll get sick the hospital system will be overwhelmed.
This is really problematic. It looks like outliers know-it-all could be ruining it for the rest of us.
I wonder if governments could use a heavy hammer and broadcast 24/24 (or at random) footages from Italian hospitals.
Also they keep track of where people enter and exit public transportation by tapping in and out of the gateways. They used that information in order to figure out where people have been and what train they have taken in order to disinfect and map people.
Basically, only countries like South Korea, China and Singapore had a chance.
The latter country even started producing their own n95 masks and distributed to their population with disinfectant while Swedish government propaganda machinery started saying "masks" are useless, very much like that did in the US. Til this day, you can't get n95 masks in Sweden.
Basically only "police states" had chances to keep their numbers from growing.
In the early days, Sweden would test every day and have 30% to 100% growth in new cases every day until they decided to re-evaluate how to test, now they got 8% and 6% new cases every week.
Obviously they're full of shit about testing, but they really never had any chance.
Honestly, only countries with where the police can actually solve crimes (assault, burglary, robbery) had a chance. Sweden can't handle the amount of crimes it has, cops shut down cases on a daily basis with the excuse "it happens all the time" - heard it twice ourselves.
In a country where they can't handle weekly bombings and shootings, they really had no chance with a disease that lacks central leadership and lives off the land. How the hell would they? There is a distinct resolve and grit that is inherently lacking amongst their people.
It's hard work, takes a lot of effort and offers very little reward. So it makes sense that the public sector in Sweden, or most of Europe for that matter has no ability to actually deal with this.
Also, good luck if you need health care in Sweden, even before Covid, you had to wait a few months, two in my case, to actually seeing a doctor who will pretend to help you. But what choice do you have, you had already paid for that doctor... tsk tsk.
Things are different in Asia where "giving up" wouldn't look good, but it's acceptable in Sweden. Anything else is Russian propaganda... obviously.
I think the saw the bad PR UK got, and decided it's better to keep silent about it. Shady, but smart. They have to massage that Sweden image any way they can.
Yesterday prime minister gave a national speech. He didn’t say anything new, except “more lives of loved ones might be lost, and we should prepare and take responsibility to avoid that”. Nothing really new.
The association between the flu and that what happened 30-40 years later sounds a little bit like a click bait.
Having said that, I grew up in Östersund and found the article fascinating and a good read.
One interesting thing is that now, a 100 years later, the tourism of the region once again brings a pandemic. Swedens largest ski resort Åre, an hour west of Östersund, has a bunch of Covid-19 cases that has spread through after ski parties (which has since stopped).
Some context to the article not relating to Covid-19:
Jämtland, the region where Östersund is located, is located in the geographic middle of Sweden, but is considered to be in the northern parts because the demographic of the country is heavily skewed south. In the west it borders Norway and in 1563–1677 it switched between being part of Denmark/Norway and Sweden 13(!) times. Perhaps as a result of this there is still a strong sense of regional identity. Among other things Jämtland is a "fake republic" with a "fake president" which gives a speech during the music festival once a year. This is just in good fun and the speech is mostly about peace, love and understanding, but hearing 15k people singing the regional anthem "Jämtlandssången" after the speech always gives me goosebumps.
Östersund has always been strategically important militarily, in semi-recent times because the Soviet Union would have to pass it to take Trondheim in Norway and the harbor there. The article mentions the airbase closing down, but there were other military units that were disbanded as well. The article touches on this mentioning the university, but another reason the town is still successful today is that it also supported newly unemployed military personel in starting companies. Since one of the units that were disbanded(/moved?) was the military technical school, the city managed to keep a bunch of people with higher education which might otherwise have relocated and now has a few tech-companies and a somewhat entrepreneurial spirit.
This is just some stream of consciousness stuff, while I live in Stockholm now I got excited "my city" was featured on HN. :)
It is a beautiful city and region with fantastic nature and a very long and fascinating history, definitely visit it if you have the opportunity!
Our government was extremely slow to act and didn't shut down anything which let the COVID-19 virus spread rapidly in Sweden and now we have an uncontrolled spread with no testing except for the groups at risk.
The article is basically clickbait, Sweden has one of the lowest amounts of hospital beds and respirators per capita in EU.
We have much fewer ICU-spots than Italy, lower hospital beds etc so we will certainly have a worse time than Italy if we cannot contain the spread somewhat.
The government still hasn't imposed a lot of restrictions compared to other countries. If this is good or bad, will be determined in the future.
Their healthcare system is now the 2nd worst in the EU. Social problems are rising right and left.
WHAT? Now I haven't been to every European country, probably around 30% of them, would be my guess. But literally the country with the best healthcare system of them all, that I've visited a hospital in, have been Sweden.
You got any numbers to backup this claim? Spain, Italy and Greece clearly have a worse healthcare system, and those are just three examples I can think of quickly. Surely lots of countries in eastern europe has it worse than Sweden.
One source showing the opposite of what you're saying:
> Sweden is ranked third by the Commonwealth Fund, with a high proportion of doctors, above-average healthcare spending, and relatively low prescriptions of drugs.
From https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/feb/09/which-countr... which is using Commonwealth Fund as it's source.
I am Italian and I live in Sweden. I am happy my family is in Italy right now.
Spain has one of the best healthcare systems in the world, usually ranked by the WHO within the top 10 while Sweden's was within top 30.
Both Spain and Sweden seems to be about equal if you average the rankings in that list. So surely if Spain has one of the best healthcare systems in the world, Sweden is pretty equal, then Sweden is nowhere near being the "2nd worst in the EU" when it comes to healthcare.
Behind is only Germany, Finland, Denmark, Slovenia, Poland. Ok, last time I've looked they were 2nd worst, now 6th.
Italy and Spain do have much better systems, by far. World Top 5. Even Greece is much better.
the UK system is public, one of the best in the world. the US system is private and one of the best in the world.
> Their healthcare system is now the 2nd worst in the EU.
you haven't been around the EU a lot right? i come from a 3rd world EU country and I can assure you Sweden is in the top EU countries.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/best-healthcare-...
But which one? The US and the UK healthcare systems are polar opposites. US is entirely privatised with many gaps in coverage, and it's the most expensive healthcare system in the world. The UK (despite its general conservativeness) has an entirely socialised system that's the cheapest in Europe.
But yes, Sweden handled this ineptly. People were coming home from hot spots in Italy - they were not tested, not told to self quarantine, anything. That's just plain stupid and slow, there's no excuse for that.
Parents who otherwise would be working at hospitals or other important features of a society. But there has been a lot of other options that just passed as you mention.
Since it is a pandemic, the spread of the virus is inevitable. If we would quarantine whole cities too early, or take other measures too early, it would just hurt us economically and push the problem forward. It's all about all about timing now and flattening the curve, which we have under control at the moment.
I am proud of our government taking decisions based on the public health authority's recommendations which are based on science. Compared to some other countries who take decisions not based on science (e.g. Denmark closing it's borders at the time was not recommended by their public health authority).
I am of the very unpopular opinion that all people actually die, that quality of life is the only thing that trumps life, and that we have to bring these things into the equation at some level. Now some people read this and immediately think that I suggest that we do nothing and let everyone die, but no I just want us to consider all sides of the equation thoroughly.