> The fact that Denmark closes down tourist areas, and the border, but allow their citizens to cross the bridge to Sweden and enjoy all the tourist areas there, and then come back to Denmark, that's just silly.

This is politically impossible to stop. Sweden has not closed its borders, so there's no one to stop danes from entering. And Denmark can't close it's borders to danish nationals, so they can't be stopped from returning home.

The Danish Government has made clear statements saying that they strongly urge people to not go to Sweden

They can't close their border to Danish nationals, but they can quarantine people for 14 days upon return. If they were completely serious about stopping this they would have done that. Nobody is going to go on a short tourism trip knowing they will be quarantined upon return home.

I don’t find it particularly odd or hypocritical that the danish government would prefer to avoid a situation where they have to forcefully quarantine people

Denmark is the king of this kind of stupidity. People call it symbolic-politics.

Remember, this is the same country that during the Syria crisis stripped incoming refugee of their belonging then dropped them off by the Swedish border.

Edit: since people are downvoting this:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/26/danish-parliam...

https://www.thelocal.se/20150910/danish-police-allow-refugee...

https://www.rt.com/news/445552-denmark-refugees-island-unwan...

Sweden had ample warning and time to prepare.

Italy, and to a lesser extent Spain, did not.

And yet they didn't prepare but the number of reported cases per capita remained below Italy and Spain.

Same day I wrote my OP it actually rose above Italy with a whopping 2200 new cases at once.

We'll see if all the students celebrating these last few days will make that rise again.

Either way my point was that the spread compared to the number of deaths is the real scandal in Sweden. Low spread, high number of deaths indicates something is wrong in healthcare.

> at least two european countries (Italy, Spain) who enforced a strict quarantine and travel ban.

Both Italy and Spain imposed strict quarantine measures in a time where the epidemic was already rampant and killing hundreds of patients a day.

Thanks to that, now they are experiencing zero deaths a day.

Note that number of cases is never the total number of cases, only the number of cases that have been tested and tested positive. This number depends very strongly on how much a country tests. Some countries test everybody, others test only severe cases.

Number of deaths is more reliable, though even those numbers can be hidden. For example, in Florida the number of COVID-19 deaths is fairly low, but the number of pneumonia deaths is more than 6 times higher than normal all of a sudden.

It's about the timing of the lockdown - once the virus was already widespread, you're closing the barn door after the horse bolted.

NZ locked down while spread was limited, and has had no new cases for 12 days, and only one remaining active case, as a result - but again, it was the timing of the lockdown - if it had happened 2 weeks later, who knows how it'd be doing.