KingslandBarge wrote:
My understanding is no quarantine, congregations under 50 allowed. Peeps can still go hit the gym, a pub and dinner on the same night. Sure proactive, but in adopting the 'flexible' approach with emphasis on self, individual governance? Not sure about that, and those fatalities and incidences are climbing. For sure, different strokes for different folks. Couldn't trust the British public to heed any public decree remotely akin to that. What's going on Klaus? I'm I missing something ?
You said that they've been lax about social distancing. I said that's factually wrong, because it is. We can discuss why the approach differ if you want, but we've done that plenty of times in the thread already. A different approach is not the same thing as being careless. The updates that I and everyone else with a tv or internet connection get from the epidemiologists and analysts at the public health institute every single weekday are a bit more nuanced than "different strokes for different folks."
People over here tend to listen to experts and scientists, that much is true. I don't know if that's actually an outlier compared to other places, but I do know that a lot of the UK thought - and still seem to think? - that your national plan was to kill millions by doing nothing to achieve a herd immunity (which at that point would be completely useless, because all the weak in need of that immunity in the first place would have been dead). We've been largely spared those kind of public meltdowns and disinformation campaigns from the press.
I guess it also helps that the governing politicians, all of whom had fairly low popularity ratings before this crisis struck, are keeping out of the way and are letting the actual experts address the public. It's not because they possess an unusual degree of common sense in fairness, but because we have laws that forbid them from exercising political pressure on Folkhälsomyndigheten (the institute for public health). But I imagine there is less inclination to misunderstand or distrust public health information when it isn't being filtered through a Boris Johnson or a Donald Trump first.
There are widely different standards when it comes to reporting the number of dead people. The mortality statistics over here are extremely thorough. If other countries counted the same way there would be a lot more cases. The fact that the number is increasing is a no-brainer on the other hand. That was always going to happen. How quickly it increases depends on things like the stage of infection, time passed since the first case, etc. We have had a fairly flattened curve so far that is rising a bit more rapidly now and believed to approach its peak soon for the Stockholm region. It hasn't overwhelmed the healthcare system - so far.
The biggest issue we have isn't connected to the preventive measures in society at large, but to liberal shithouse ideas about privatisation that we're now paying retroactively for. Consider that 40-50 percent of all nation-wide deaths over the age of 70 so far have happened inside retirement homes and services in Stockholm. The biggest reason for this is that the right-wing government who held office for a decade before the current one almost completely sold off the elderly care in that region to private interests. It's now decentrialised and governed by for-profit corporations that have no connection to healthcare, and they're employing part-time workers without any formal healthcare training. I understand Stockholm is an utter disgrace compared to Norway (and even Denmark) in this regard. It's a jarring contrast to some other Swedish regions too, like Skåne, where only a handful of deaths have been reported despite millions of people living there.
By contrast, other viruses such as the winter sickness bug (which is usually pretty bad over here) have completely died out 10 weeks early, and it's mainly attributed to successful social distancing and a much higher obsession with hygiene.
