>Leaders in some European countries have suggested enforcing tough lockdown measures early in the COVID-19 outbreak may not have been entirely necessary.
>Norway’s prime minister Erna Solberg said during a television interview last week with state broadcaster NRK that its approach had been over cautious.
>“I probably took many of the decisions out of fear. Worst case scenarios became controlling,” Ms Solberg explained.
>She assured viewers that strict restrictions were imposed based on the international state of the disease at the time, but said that on reflection perhaps they were misguided.
[0] https://au.news.yahoo.com/coronavirus-norway-pm-regrets-not-...
That's the beautiful thing about these almost meaningless cross-country comparisons - the data is so low-quality and heterogenous that you can pick a pair of countries and validate pretty much every hypothesis with it.
- for cases: how widespread was the testing? How quickly did it ramp up (e.g. how many tests per 1M in relation to 1000th case)?
- for deaths: what counts as a COVID death? Is death with COVID = death from COVID?
- how soon after the onset of the epidemic in the particular country were lockdown measures enacted? How long did they last? How stringent were they in reality vs on paper?
There are many countries who figured out how to play this numbers game. Russia, for example, faithfully reports any and all cases of COVID and simultaneously employs every trick in the book to minimize the number of deaths. They have already and will continue to win propaganda points from people who then use these meaningless death numbers to compare to another country's far more accurate death numbers and proceed to draw garbage conclusions from garbage data.
Sweden took less drastic action than the US. Sweden did take some action early, encouraging social distancing, increased hand hygiene etc. Then again, in Sweden you can take sick leave with full pay. More people will stay home if they feel sick.
Parts of the US took more drastic actions, but very, very late (during a pandemic where number of cases double every 4-5 days, one week is late, several weeks is very late). Shutting down borders to foreigners doesn't cut it when the virus is already spreading in the communities.
While they ended up in almost the same place, you really cannot compare them. The Swedish circumstances are so different from those of the US, that you cannot expect the Swedish same strategy to work the same way in the US.
And before you claim that the Swedish strategy is a success, consider how Sweden compares to its Nordic neighbors, where you can compare the circumstances.
Per 1,000,000 inhabitants: