While I agree mostly with your assessment, it's worth mentioning that the lack of official lockdown in Sweden doesn't mean there isn't a lockdown. According to Google's mobility data for Sweden, their lockdown activity looks pretty similar to what we see in the US. People are voluntarily staying home.
Since Sweden doesn't have a lockdown, this statement is meaningless. A major objection to lockdowns is their involuntary nature. In general, there is a big difference between choosing to stay home, and being coerced (with the threat of force) to do so. One is "choosing to do what you believe is best", the other is "prison".
In the meantime, the coastal town that I live in is getting swarmed with out of town visitors every weekend. This is in violation of the shelter-in-place orders. Other towns have stepped up enforcement to combat this type of behavior, but our police department is small and does not have the resources. We shut down the parking lots, but now they just park in the neighborhoods. And to add insult to injury, we have a large senior housing complex at the entrance point to my neighborhood.
I have little faith that the US could achieve the type of distancing and isolation necessary on a voluntary basis. There is a sharp vein of individualism that runs through our society that works strongly against us in these types of situations.
It's by no means a "hope and pray it goes away" or a "lets wait it out until a vaccine" -- it's a "let's get everyone not in a risk category infected as fast as possible so long as the healthcare system retains some excess capacity."
> healthcare facilities remain un-saturated
You can't simply look at the current burden on the health care system to guide the process. The virus has a 2-3 week lag time between when an infection cluster breaks out, and when the health care system starts to feel the impact. Without wide scale testing, we are just going to end up back in a lock down once the infection numbers start climbing again. And I can't think of a worse scenario for our economy than having to shut things down every other month because our government is to incompetent to implement a tracing program that multiple countries already have up and running.
If we don't develop herd immunity ASAP, and instead pursue a course of lockdowns, as soon as we lift the lockdowns (either voluntarily or because people just walk out -- see the midwest), we'll immediately start playing rolling lockdown whack-a-mole as China is. The first contagious person who flies in from a foreign country (or domestically) without perfect lockdowns will re-ignite the wildfire.
We should do exactly what Sweden is doing and what the UK proposed: isolate and provide support services to those who are at risk, and let out those who aren't. I think it speaks volumes that Sweden's new infection rate stabilized at the same time as the rest of the world but without lockdowns.
It's really the only path forward. Is it perfect? Of course not. People will die. However, there's no world in which about 70% of the population won't get the disease before the vaccine arrives, so we need to control who gets it, when, and in what order, to minimize harm.