[throwaway202020]

May be it's more fair to count for the months of COVID, March-July. So normal deaths would have been 42,000 during this period but COVID roughly added 10%. While this is still high and non-trivial amount, the fascinating thing is that almost everyone thought they will turn into Wuhan with dead bodies on roads and overflowing hospitals. For virus spread, soft lockdown was considered inconsequential back in March and any country doing nothing but hard lockdown was despised. In US, many people criticized for not having China style lockdown. In my view, Sweden has definitely done something that is worthy of study. I think it will be unfair to go back and say, yeah, soft down was all you needed in retrospect to devalue their achievement and what everyone thought was rather risky bet.

[kalleboo]

Yeah the projections from respected institutions like the IHME showed that with Swedens minor interventions, they should have had 80,000 deaths. This was later revised down to 18,000 deaths with better models.