Deaths per 100,000 for selected countries:

    66.84 Spain
    63.26 UK
    62.50 US
    59.27 Italy
    57.74 Sweden
    36.92 Ireland
    11.30 Germany
     8.81 Turkey
     6.14 Finland
     5.79 Egypt
     3.23 Greece
     1.05 Japan
     0.45 New Zealand
     0.04 Vietnam
     0.03 Taiwan

The group of countries with better response than Sweden (or the US) comprise the majority of the world, and also diverse in terms of regions, government systems, economic development, culture, population, and area. It's hard to argue that Sweden actually did well in any subgroup.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_...

Deaths attributed to the disease. Every country counts them differently. In the us if you died while having the disease you counted as a COVID death. In some countries it’s only if the disease is what killed you that you get attributed, in some they haven’t had testing available to test deaths during their peaks, and some just want to keep their numbers low to avoid getting their exports and borders shut down.

Sweden's population is far healthier than Michigan's and has better access to high-quality care. This can be seen from the differences in their life expectancy (82 vs 78).

Imagine how bad Michigan would've been if they followed the Swedish model.

For comparison with the US, Massachusetts might be a better choice. World class healthcare, highly educated population, average life expectancy of 80yrs 8 months [0], and a similar-ish sized population (6.8M in MA vs 10.3M in Sweden).

Despite a lengthy lockdown, excellent social distancing and fairly high mask compliance MA hasn't done so well. As of Sept 29 MA has recorded 9423 deaths vs 5893 in Sweden [1][2].

Unfortunately, like Sweden, MA was not able to prevent COVID19 from spreading to nursing homes with over 64% of deaths (6K+) occurring in long term care (LTC) facilities alone. In fact MA was #1 in the US for deaths in LTC homes with 12.35% of the _entire_ LTC population in the state dying from COVID19 and #3 in the US for COVID19 infections in LTC homes with 35% of _all_ LTC residents contracting COVID19 [2]. This is really a terrible, awful (and avoidable) failure on the Commonwealth's part.

[0] https://www.mass.gov/news/life-expectancy-rises-in-massachus...

[1] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/massachusetts/

[2] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/

[3] https://data.cms.gov/stories/s/COVID-19-Nursing-Home-Data/bk...

America had an appallingly incompetent Covid response, with poor testing, tracing, and compliance. This makes it a poor benchmark for updating your priors, unless one of your previous beliefs was "America can muster a coordinated response to a pandemic".

You can count on one hand the number of countries with a “good” COVID response.

Most Asian countries did pretty well.

And many countries in Africa also