Ugh... why must we do this? Are you really onside or is it just a sunk cost at this point, an artifact of your overall alignment?
A Canadian COVID policy lover, of all things. Well, let's go I guess.
Your error is twofold. One, you should be looking at excess deaths for this period due to differences in diagnostics, reporting, all sorts of things. Two, you assume that what you perceive as high Swedish COVID deaths are a consequence of the lack of mask mandates, and move these unfortunate people from the gallows into a "saved by Canada" anteroom you have built in your mind.
What we all know here is that Sweden had an absolutely enormous initial wave of COVID that was unlike anything Canada saw and occured in the late winter and spring of 2020. It came about due to Stockholm county's spring break coinciding with the enormous wave of infection in Northern Italy, which was the epicentre of the disease at that time, when it was very early and very potent.
The early "Swedish" wave was in fact a Stockholm phenomenon, and its contribution to the numbers has to do with a specific travel phenomenon and not national prophylactic measures. Malmo, for instance, was seeing numbers in line with Copenhagen across the border.
In March-April 2020, Sweden was no. 3 in COVID infections per capita in the world.
This was before the tomfoolery seen in Canada with masks and plexiglass and "papers, please" . By the time Canada had legislated masks on planes (SAS did that too), the wave was in decline. By June,
as these mandates started to spread in Canada, the worst was over for good.
Where Sweden faltered was in its care homes, a truly bad outcome very much like New York and to a lesser extent parts of Quebec, but nothing to do with the metric on which I am comparing the two countries' responses.
There is legitimate moral anger and regret over the care homes here. There is none over your silly "saved by Canada" construction, because nobody thinks that Canadian-style measures would have done anything except distort the society, hamper education and create ugly legal precedents.
It is amazing to me that you would assume that Swedes were just somehow willing to tolerate a massacre, and to send their loved ones into their graves when a crude system of curfews, plexiglass dividers, iPad school and all the rest would have saved them.
That your obedience would force you into such a damning critique of a not-too-dissimilar people.
But you don't think this. Not really. You just know two things: 1) the protesters there were outgroup from your North American centre-left perspective (here, they were mainly old-school socialists), and 2) your country became a "papers, please" place in the 21st century, and no one would want to admit they did that for nothing.
I was in Toronto and Halifax in 2022 and they looked like shit. My niece and nephew thought "school" was a tablet app for two years.
Canada fucked up in those years and Sweden did better. I can't believe this is contested.
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