Colby Cosh : Sweden’s ‘state epidemiologist’ Anders Tegnell can explain all the COVID-19 deaths

/colby-cosh-swedens-state-epidemiologist

  • Colby Cosh: Sweden’s ‘state epidemiologist’ Anders Tegnell can explain all the COVID-19 deaths | National Post
    https://nationalpost.com/opinion/colby-cosh-swedens-state-epidemiologist-anders-tegnell-can-explain-all

    Swedish officialdom believes the Swedish people are uniquely capable of being trusted to act in concert for a national goal. There is an operating assumption that public health “messaging” will be followed correctly by all, without question or resistance. But this doesn’t seem to have worked out well for Sweden’s 60,000-plus Somali immigrants, who are, Tegnell admitted on Tuesday, grotesquely overrepresented in the country’s COVID-19 mortality statistics.

    (...)

    [critic & virologist] Lena Einhorn and her co-signers don’t think Tegnell is taking asymptomatic spread seriously enough. (The official public health advice is that citizens should self-isolate only if they show flu-like symptoms.) Tegnell’s stated belief is that symptomatic persons are bound to account for most of the spread of the virus in the community; this is, he observes, the World Health Organization’s position and it is true of most other viral diseases.

    “It is clear,” he told Einhorn, “that if we stop the symptomatic cases, the pandemic will stop altogether.”

    (...)

    But Tegnell is far out on a limb. In his Tuesday scrum he observed that Swedish intensive care units remain in good shape — which the newspapers confirm. Much of the death is happening, and stop me if this surprises you Canadian readers, in long-term care homes for the elderly. This fact, along with the havoc being endured in Somali suburbs of Stockholm, provided part of what sounds to the foreign ear like a bizarre defence of his policy.

    Yes, Tegnell confessed, we as a country have failed to protect our elderly; that doesn’t imply that I, or my choice of strategy, failed. Because Swedish health is so good, he seemed to suggest, the persons in long-term care in Sweden are unusually old. In other countries, those seniors would probably be in a hospital! (But would they still be alive, or…?)

    As for the Somalis, Tegnell said, “We know that these people have not integrated so well into society,” chalking their predicament up to “socioeconomics.”

    #suède #mal_barrés #racisme #âgisme