hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr3191.txt

Episode: 3191
Title: HPR3191: Swedish Corona Experience
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3191/hpr3191.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 18:29:14

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3191 for Monday 26 October 2020. Today's show is entitled
Swedish Corona Experience,
and is part of the series, Health and Health Care. It is the tenth show of Daniel Persson
and is about 16 minutes long
and carries a clean flag. The summary is,
I will cover my experience of the coronavirus.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by Ananasthos.com.
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Hello hackers and welcome to another podcast.
And this podcast is going to be a little bit different because usually I take a topic that I know well
and I talk about that topic for a while just out of my head.
But this time I'm going to talk about something that I don't know that much about
and I'm not an expert. I can't stress that enough.
My wife is a nurse and she is really against spreading of misinformation.
So I'm going to talk about the coronavirus and I'm going to talk about how it's covered in Sweden
because I live in Sweden and I'm going to talk about from my,
I can only talk about how I have experienced COVID and what I have seen around me
and also a little bit about the recommendations that has been given to me.
So first off we're going to talk a little bit about the structure in Sweden.
We have one government, one country.
But this country is divided into 21 counties and 1,290 municipalities.
So it's a lot of different divisions here and for the whole country we have the government that rules.
And each county has different departments that decide on different things
and the municipalities also have different things that they decide on.
But in this case when it comes to sickness and health and the hospital system we are talking about counties.
So the counties are deciding on the health of their population but they get recommendation from the government.
And in government there is a department, a health department that is giving recommendation to the whole country.
So their recommendations is as follows, the general recommendations they have a lot of information on their website
and a lot of different things that they are answering but I'm going to go through the general things.
The first thing is if you're sick stay at home.
And if you have any symptoms of respiratory issues, fever, aching muscles or headache, you should go test yourself.
So everyone that has any symptoms should test themselves.
And when you wash your hands you need to wash them for 20 seconds and you can use alcohol afterwards with at least 60% alcohol content.
So it's important to wash your hands regularly and you can use alcohol to be even safer.
You should avoid touching your face with unwashed hands.
You should keep distance at least on length.
I tell my kids that we should keep two meters distance or the length of our bikes from each other.
And it's really cute to see them jumping away to the left or the right when they are meeting people.
And keep distance, keep distance.
But that's very important.
We should not gather in large companies for birthdays or weddings and so on.
And we should try not to use public transport, walking or biking when possible.
And if you're required to go by public transport, you should book a ticket if possible or not.
If not, you should go when not that many people are going.
So when it's low time where at least people are going.
And if you are able, you should work from home.
And I have not worked at my office since the beginning of this year.
And we will not work from our office for the rest of the year either.
We are working in IT.
I'm creating programs and so on.
So I have no reason to go into work.
I think in our department, we are 40 people.
And of them, I think in the office, there might be one or two, perhaps up to five people at a time visiting our office.
And doing work there because they need to be at the office.
But we have reduced as much as possible so we don't gather in large companies.
And when it comes to school, my kids go to school and they are the age up to ninth grade.
So they are younger.
But everyone that goes from ninth grade and up, they should go to or should work from home.
So they should have their schooling from home and use any video conferencing in order to do that work.
And that has been in effect since the beginning of this year.
But the next term now that started in August, I believe that some of the older kids also go to school.
But the younger ones have always gone to school.
And our school is very good at sending out information about COVID.
And they are updating us all the time about what the health authority is telling us.
But for now, it said that we should keep our kids at home if they have any symptoms.
And if they have symptoms, we should test them as well.
And if they are testing negative and feel well, they can go back to school in one or two days.
But if they are not tested, they should be symptom free plus two days before they can return to school.
And if they are not tested and have milder symptoms, they can go back to school after a week.
So they can have a little bit of a running cold for a week.
But no other symptoms, then they might return without any testing.
So there is a lot of different ways to interpret this.
And each county will interpret these recommendations differently and give information to their citizens in order to make it as good as possible for everyone in the population.
And because there is such a division between different counties in this country,
there have also been a very wide variety of spreading.
So if we are looking at the large city Stockholm, live far from Stockholm, but that county have had the most cases.
Perhaps because there are much more people there.
I don't know. We don't know. We will not know have really good information about this until like let's say 10 years from now.
So nobody knows, but we are trying our best. We are trying to do the best decision we can with the little information that we have.
So in the county that I live is a smaller county and it's not the same county as the larger city Gothenburg that is close by.
They are in a different county, but it's only like 30 kilometers to Gothenburg, but it's still a different county.
So they have different recommendations there, but Gothenburg has not been hit that hard as hard as Stockholm.
So and we don't really know why Malmö has not been hit that hard either.
And we don't know really why they're either, but it differs a lot between different counties in Sweden.
And when this started in the beginning of the year, we didn't know, we didn't have the information needed.
We did a lot of people went back from their winter vacations. A lot of people were in the Mediterranean's vacationing.
And perhaps they took a lot of the coronavirus with them home because there were so many people moving around.
So it might be the case that we had a large upswing in the beginning.
And we also in Sweden have retirement homes to a large degree.
So either the people above the year of 70 live by their own, their selves, or their live in a retirement home.
They suddenly live a full family with the elderly in the same house.
So that means that there were some issues in the beginning on their retirement home, and a lot of people got infected there.
And because there is a large population of people over 70 in the same house, it spread.
That was a big issue we had in the beginning. And since March, no one has been allowed to visit their elderly in their retirement home.
So that has not been allowed at all since March.
And my parents live at home, in their home home. They live very close by to me, but I still do not visit them or go into their house.
They are not allowed to go into our house. We are keeping distance. We are still meeting each other what we are trying to keep a distance between us.
And my sister has actually told my parents that they can't go to the store and buy groceries.
We should do that for them. And in the beginning in March, April and so on, it was very strict.
And now they are going from time to time, but we are still doing most of the shopping for them.
So we are trying to help the elderly out. We are trying to keep this from spreading in the elder population.
But we are also trying to limit in between ourselves. So we have, I have not, I've worked from home, I've gone to the store from time to time.
Let's say that I have gone shopping for groceries once or twice every week.
And we have also gone to some activities for the children. They are going to learn to swim.
My son does karate and so on. We have some of those very limited activities that they are doing, but we are staying mostly at home.
Our kids are not playing with their friends inside other houses. They are playing outside if they want to play off the school.
And yeah, we are trying to keep distance, trying to keep the spread from happening.
So that's pretty much my experience with the coronavirus. And so far, I feel that it works fine for me.
I'm a little bit of an introvert, so I have no problem at staying at home and only meeting people over Zoom or Google Meet or any of those services.
I have no problem in doing my work because I have machines at home to actually do my coding.
And I'm not that person that needs to go visit all my friends all the time.
The only thing that perhaps have been a little bit harder for me is that I have chosen not to go to my swim training.
So I've trained a lot less and I move less now. I should obviously move more to be stay healthy.
I've done some Beat Saber at home and so on trying to keep up with that.
But mostly that's the only large difference for me.
Going to the office is not a plus or a benefit for me. It can be fun to meet one of your colleagues and talk in the office over a coffee break or so.
But it's not something that I crave.
So this is what I have experienced around Corona, a little bit about how we are coping with it in Sweden, what the recommendations are.
But to be very clear, I'm not a health professional, nothing that I said today should be taken as facts.
Everything is just things that I have experienced and I have heard from other sources.
I hope that you found this interesting and I hope that you are using more open source.
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