Because the government figured that contact tracing wouldn't contain the spread, it was already too far gone. Based on that it was better to reserve the tests available to those who actually need them.
The Swedish government has purposefully decided to obfuscate the facts, ignore the data, with the logic that a) it won't necessarily help and b) the data will only cause panic, etc..
Can you imagine the US government doing such a thing?
This is deeply, deeply disturbing and it's hypocritical to defend their actions in light of authoritarian tactics around the world.
The WHO and nations that have been successful (Korea) have been saying test, test, test test. It's a key to suppression.
No, they did not. The Swedish government stopped testing to conserve resources due to a severe lack of test kits.
I have some criticism of the lack of transparency from the Swedish government, but they did not stop testing to hide anything. The lack of testing resources was very real.
In reply to jariel: Because they've said so, continuously and consistently from the start, with quite logical arguments. You could check the press conferences they hold every day if you want to see for yourself.
It's way too early to say (which is also pointed out by the government), but ICU cases (which is the critical metric here, since it's quite reliable and comparable, and the metric that matters the most for the Healthcare system) is showing signs of decline (or at least stabilizing).
In unsure if our approach is the right one (time will tell). It's clear that the government is taking this situation very seriously though, just using a different strategy. And honestly it seems to at least not be much worse than any other country at this point.
In the face of the fact that the number thing the WHO is recommending, and which we know helps a lot, is testing - you are essentially saying that the Swedish healthcare pandemic response is incompetent.
Testing has increased radically in almost every advanced country, in neighboring Norway, they have 4x more testing - do you not think that Sweden, a rich, advanced nation would somehow be able to figure out how to expand testing?
The testing/capita figures are here [1] where you can see that Sweden is, in fact, testing quite a bit behind most other rich nations (though not far behind Denmark).
So the question is, why are they failing so badly on this venue? Or have they actually decided to focus elsewhere?
I find it easier to believe they are actually competent, but taking a different approach and they are obfuscating/lying about their ability to expand testing.
Edit: I am adding the official Swedish statement as reference:
"Almost all those who get Covid-19 have mild symptoms and recover without requiring medical care. There are thus no medical reasons to test all those who have a cough, sore threat, fever or other symptoms that may indicate a Covid-19 infection, but may in fact be caused by another type of infection. The Public Health Agency of Sweden recommends testing of those people who have a very high fever or acute respiratory symptoms and require hospital care." [2]
Unfortunately, they indicate that 'there is no medical reason to test for Covid unless high fever' which I think is a problematic statement in the context of a pandemic. Of course, there are 'medical reasons to test' beyond those factors.
Not really, the data they communicate that they are basing their decisions on are the number being admitted to ICU per day. Which actually has been decreasing in Sweden and is a hard fact you can't deny. Since everyone really sick will end up there. Not the unknown number, which you might catch a percentage of the general population by testing.
Sweden has now started anti-body tests on general populations to try to get more correct statistics across the whole population.
So yes, testing is amazing and super important in the early phase, i.e. Korea when it was fairly localized and contact tracing worked well enough. When community spread is there in several places all you can do is limit the it according to the models.
ICU admissions, as you say is a 'hard figure' of what matters, in some ways, yes I agree, I see what you are trying to say.
But what you are saying is like "We shouldn't count the Nazis coming across the border, let's just count the number of people they kill, that's all the data we need"
1) 'fewer ICU admissions' is absolutely not a hard fact (!), because the number of confirmed cases is growing quite a lot in Sweden [1], it's absolutely inevitable that many of them will end up in the ICU. Sweden Covid cases are growing rapidly, borderline exponentially. ICU cases will 100% increase unless Swedes are literally superbeings.
2) Other kinds of data are really important in terms of planning and modeling. This is the most existential crisis since WW2. Wouldn't it make sense to test as extensively as possible? Surely, the cost must be some kind of factor, but the alternative is an economic meltdown.
I don't think they have an excuse: 'rapidly expanding and pervasive testing' should be high on the agenda of every nation facing this crisis.
In fact, I think that cheap, pervasive testing will be one of the ways we can lift these lockdowns and get people back into the community.
> Can you imagine the US government doing such a thing?
There are plenty of state governors that are completely ignoring the data, and are refusing to implement lockdowns like their neighbouring states. No need to imagine, it's already happening over here.
can't really reach that conclusion. Mortality rate is too dependent on how many people have been tested, not the underlying mortality. Nobody knows the true denominator in these equations.