They werent because their official position was to not send old people to the hospital and to just let them die. 50% of all people who died lived in care homes, despite the intention being to protect exactly those people.
Here is the BBC reporting about it: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52704836
Reports about withheld care have been hard to verify. Reports about lousy routines with regards to sanitation and disinfection have been more common. The debate about the quality of this kind of care has been going on for more than 2 decades, since even before Sweden's rather extreme laws about winnings in state-funded health care. The utter failure of these homes to not spread covid-19 is the real news. The numbers are atrocious, and stories about workers walking from sick elderly to healthy elderly without proper procedures have been rather common.
Sure, the angle BBC chose is juicier, but I have some serious doubts about the accounts published.
Dont they have a higher population density compared to Sweden?
Non-emergency procedures and so on have all been postponed, obviously, but everyone who actually had to go to the hospital were able to do so. So our strategy worked great as far as flattening the curve/keeping the hospitals afloat.
This is me being an armchair expert, but I think the one major thing that they should have done differently is stop visitation in hospitals and elderly care. It took a little bit too long before they did that which allowed the virus to hit the elderly care. Some specific elderly care homes have had a crazy high mortality rate for example.
Keeping the schools and daycare open was also part of the plan to not overtax the hospitals, since a non-trivial amount of nurses would've had to stay home to take care of their kids if they couldn't go to daycare/school.
There's a bunch of other stuff going on with the UK that has increased the number of deaths:
10 years of austerity has cut budgets to local authorities, and they're responsible for public health (so things like track and trace). LAs are also responsible for care homes, and the lack of budget means care home workers are on minimum wage zero hour contracts, so they feel they have to work and they often work in more than one place. This means they're more likely to spread covid-19 to vulnerable residents.
> the justification for the lockdown was to avoid overwhelming the healthcare system (flattening the curve to under the hospital capacity, which everyone seems to have forgotten now)
There are ways to avoid overwhelming the hospitals. One way (which is what the UK did) is to just let people die in the care homes and never admit them to hospital. That's not great.
The problem with ending lockdown is that in many places it's not being done with any care. There's a rush to end lockdown without any measures being put in place around what to do if the number of infections starts to rise again.
> At 43 deaths per 100,000, Sweden’s death rate is among the highest globally and far exceeds that of neighboring Denmark and Norway, which imposed much tougher lockdowns at the outset of the pandemic.
However:
1) that is much less than many other european countries (Belgium, Spain, UK, Italy, France) which all implemented a full lockdown. You would logically expect more death if you spare a lockdown to your population. Having less deaths than many countries who implemented a lockdown is not, I think, a disastrous outcome. It is rather a success.
2) the justification for the lockdown was to avoid overwhelming the healthcare system (flattening the curve to under the hospital capacity, which everyone seems to have forgotten now). As far as I know the Swedish healthcare system wasn't overwhelmed.