> But one would also expect death rates to be higher initially due to our ignorance of the disease, so front-loading could be risky.

Yeah, the front loading strategy pretty much presumes that there will be no effective treatment or it will come too late to do any good. That may or may not be true.

If an effective vaccine is developed, then Sweden's strategy will be the opposite of vindicated.

No, it won't. Vaccines are irrelevant, they are far too slow to develop given the timelines of a virus. The virus has come and gone in most of the world and vaccines are still at the stage of being paused because of serious reactions.

> The virus has come and gone in most of the world and vaccines are still at the stage of being paused because of serious reactions.

Huh? The virus has not "gone," except perhaps in places that implemented actual lockdowns (not just stay at home orders) and maintain strict travel restrictions, like China.

For comparison: China's population is 136 times that of Sweden [1] and it has had fewer COVID deaths in absolute terms than Sweden (4,634 vs 5,846) [2]. Even assuming the true figure in China is 10x what the official number is, that's still far fewer deaths per capita. If China has had an equivalent per capita dealths, it would have had 800,000 dead from COVID [3].

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=sweden+population vs https://www.google.com/search?q=china+population

[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=sweden+covid+deaths vs https://www.google.com/search?q=china+covid+deaths

[3] https://www.google.com/search?q=(5846+%2F+10.23+million)+*+1...

Deaths dropped to ~zero months ago in much of Europe. There are still many PCR positives occurring, quite why this is the case is unclear as almost none of these people are unwell. Defined using the WHO pre-2009 definition (before they changed it so they could declare swine flu an epidemic), the epidemic is over. What's left is a 'ghost epidemic' of tests set to hair-trigger margins flagging a huge number of false positives where the virus is either not present or not doing anything, but that doesn't matter.