It's fairly impossible to say "Sweden should hav ebeen more careful with its elderly" - The measures put in place by Sweden were designed with that in mind.
That's why elderly care facilities were the first, if not only ones, to face quarantine.
However, when you have years of poor management of elderly care, and elderly care companies that refuse to heed the recommendations, there's not much "Sweden" can do in the moment wihtout severe effort.
And the politicians should have put in that severe, very expensive effort. But that would have required them to be fast, which is not a very Swedish thing. Everything is extremely decentralised and in many cases privatized.
Either the state (highest level) should have forced an intervention, or all actors should have acted responsibly. But there is too much inertia. The elderly care is so poorly managed, it was not only a disaster waiting to happen, it actually was a slow burning dumpster fire even before Covid19.
How would they do that? I think it's safe to assume right away that the companies aren't going to act responsibly, because, well, they haven't for years. So that leaves the state, and what should they do?
Not like they can push a button and invent more caretakers, fix internal routines, etc, across an entire country.
I'd love it if they could, but in general, there is going to be inertia when trying to affect change in a system that has been degrading for years, with actors actively working against those changes (in this case, companies putting profit over welfare).
It's so very, very easy to say "the state should have done something, fast", but it gets very difficult when you're trying to specify which parts of the state should have done what, to which actors and on which level.
Right, and it had nothing to do with Tegnell’s resistance to the idea of asymptomatic carriers and hence his guidance that care workers were free to go into work as long as they didn’t show symptoms.
Edit: Also, your comment basically justifies the lockdowns in every other country. Tegnell’s whole argument was that the enlightened Swedes didn’t need a mandatory lockdown because they would simply do the right thing without the government telling them. And there is some truth to that in a society that is wealthy, well educated, and highly trusting of its government. Despite that, it’s citizenry failed to achieve what Tegnell said they would.
How in the world would you expect other countries’ citizens to voluntarily do what the government was recommending when Sweden couldn’t? His criticism of lockdowns in other countries was completely unwarranted based on his own reasoning for why Sweden didn’t need a lockdown (which also, as you point out, turned out to be wrong).
That's why elderly care facilities were the first, if not only ones, to face quarantine.
However, when you have years of poor management of elderly care, and elderly care companies that refuse to heed the recommendations, there's not much "Sweden" can do in the moment wihtout severe effort.