I feels like it's way too early to say which country did good here and which country did bad. In Spain we're mostly still in quarantine, and will continue to be. There are so many factors in this world events that it's hard to say who handled it best. Think it'll take years before we can come to any conclusions. On the surface, it seems Spain handled it much better than Sweden, as we used to have lots of cases, but now we have less. Sweden instead have remained with the same rate since end of March. So looks better, but all the falloff from this event has yet to been measured so again, too early to tell, at least for me.
Lots of people point to Sweden vs e.g. Norway and say "look, different strategy different outcome!" but there are as many if not more examples of "different strategy same outcome", indicating that mitigations isn't the whole story.
He's not directly responsible for thousands of deaths. Not doing something that could have saved lives is different from actively doing something to hurt people. Otherwise we'd all be responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths because we didn't spend a bit of money to donate more mosquito nets to Africa, where a huge number of people die every year from preventable malaria.
I'd argue that we are (and not just for mosquito nets), we just rationalize it away and forget it. Distance helps a lot, in that sense. But this guy is likely to meet or talk to people who were directly affected by his decision, basically every day for the rest of his life.
What if your job is to do something to save lives?
To take your analogy to its logical conclusion, you're also saying a firefighter isn't responsible for a building burning to the ground, even when he's standing in front of the building with a hose in his hand.
I have to disagree, this is not how public policy works and there are more than just loss of life to consider such as economic impacts and cascading effects. You cant consider this from a "all lives are sacred and must be preserved" perspective. Believe it or not public policy DOES put a price on life and for good reason: you cant mitigate away ALL risk of death. Think of speed limits or even the normal flu death rate. You can't have a functioning society if everyone lives in bubbles and drives 5mph because all life must be preserved. Even the US CDC acknowledges this, and they themselves calculate on average the economic loss of a human life is 10 million USD over their lifetime. When the mitigation cost (including cascading effects) exceeds this, then its not considered reasonable to implement at a public policy level. Sure he is an epidemiologist but he has been designated to make a public policy decision so I don't think its fair to place the blame on him. Flatten the Curve focused on hospital capacity and the avoidance of overwhelm and triage death, not necessarily covid related death and not preserving all life. The area under the curve is the same, we will all be infected at some point. I highly doubt any vaccine will be effective since they were failures for SARS or MERS. My money is on better treatments.
On the other, I wonder how one can sleep at night with the knowledge one was directly responsible for thousands of deaths. Or how can one's career recover from something like this.