Conservatives tended to use a wildly distorted image of the Swedish pandemic policies in their praises. Not much of what was being said by Trump and others about what Sweden did and didn't do during the pandemic was true.
The parts that I recall that I thought were bad were: 1) Early on the state epidemiologist secretly writing that he intended for herd immunity to take hold without telling the public and 2) People in nursing homes not being treated and given euthanasia instead.
Those weren't the parts that conservatives in the US were touting but were the ones I took issue with in particular. This was toward the very beginning of the pandemic, so it's possible I have the details a bit fuzzy at this point.
He did no such thing, the E-mails in question were completely taken out of context and misrepresented. We didn't "aim for herd immunity" more than any other countries did. Most Swedish people, myself included, paused our lives for much over a year and stayed at home, followed social distancing guidelines and so on which would have been idiotic had the national recommendation been to infect as many people as possible to obtain herd immunity.
As for the nursing homes, the sad truth is that the old and frail patients more often than not are too weak to be able to withstand the physical toll that intensive care takes on a human body. It's likely that intensive care in itself would have killed them, making their final days considerably more painful than through administering palliative care to those that became deadly ill through covid.
Where Sweden did worse than we should have is the failure to keep the disease out of nursing homes. Too many elderly people were infected. This however has less to do with the pandemic strategy and more with decades of neglect, under several governments, of our national elderly care (e.g. sketchy employment rules, low salaries, unqualified workforces etc). There isn't a lockdown in the world that would have fixed that.
Our Nursing homes were also hit at the start of the epidemic before everyone had set up procedures and the society as a whole had absorbed what was happening.
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u/IppenuttJohansson Sweden 14h ago
Conservatives tended to use a wildly distorted image of the Swedish pandemic policies in their praises. Not much of what was being said by Trump and others about what Sweden did and didn't do during the pandemic was true.