Sweden’s death toll is at least twice as much as all it’s comparable neighbors and it’s economy was the worst performing of the lot.<p>There is no point comparing Sweden to “at least 56 countries that did worse” because Sweden is a highly advanced society with excellent healthcare infrastructure (poor healthcare infrastructure is very strongly correlated with worse outcomes).<p>Sweden’s entire original approach (which they changed, btw, after which their death rate plummeted) was based on a single fallacy. That asymptomatic people did not spread COVID. Unfortunately, since Tegnell refused to initially believe this, which led to a lot of deaths, he doubled down until the evidence for asymptomatic spread became too strong to ignore, at which point Sweden also did change their approach, and incorporated lockdowns, etc into the mix of tools that they used.<p>Of course, by that point our understanding of COVID was much better, testing was far more prevalent and widespread, efc. So lockdowns we’re not really necessary outside of rare circumstances.