It should be a lot lower, give that Sweden’s biggest city has roughly 1.5 million inhabitants (vs 8.9 million in the UK), and Sweden’s population density is 24 people per km2 (vs 281 per km2 in the UK).
This is a bit misleading. The urban population of sweden sits at 85%, the UK at 83%. Yes there's lots of space in Sweden, and it's also true that barely anyone lives there.
I'm still hoping some researcher will publish a dataset of 'median lived density', rather than a simple density average. That is to say, a weighted density calculation. In other words, if 100 people live in one building in a vast desert the size of Texas, their 'lived/experienced density' or 'weighted density' is far greater than if 100 people live spread out in an area the size of a few football fields. Then we could have a more sophisticated discussion around density, as this issue aaaalways pops up when doing comparisons at the national level. (at the city level it's not as big of a problem, although even there some weird zoning differences can sometimes throw figures off.)
You might be interested in this article about lived population density vs rate of spread of COVID-19.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.01167
Although I do not have enough statistical knowledge to really tell if the author's assessment is correct.
I'm still hoping some researcher will publish a dataset of 'median lived density', rather than a simple density average. That is to say, a weighted density calculation. In other words, if 100 people live in one building in a vast desert the size of Texas, their 'lived/experienced density' or 'weighted density' is far greater than if 100 people live spread out in an area the size of a few football fields. Then we could have a more sophisticated discussion around density, as this issue aaaalways pops up when doing comparisons at the national level. (at the city level it's not as big of a problem, although even there some weird zoning differences can sometimes throw figures off.)