They had zero deaths yesterday. Sweden is not aiming for a suppression strategy with cases like New Zealand and Australia.

I understand, and there's not going to be a way to judge the outcome until after this is all "over." I think articles saying that they've been successful are premature, for the reasons I mentioned before, but it is too early to call it a loss either.

My personal forecast is that by the end I think they're going to have similar levels of economic damage (can't export to closed countries) and higher death rates than their direct neighbors who implemented more restrictive policies and we will never have a clear way to decide if that was better or worse because there is no answer to "how many deaths are worth it?"

It depends on how you define success. How about happiness and freedom of movement?

It really depends how you define freedom of movement too.

For some, there's more happiness and freedom of movement during strong, compliant social-distancing measures, if you feel safe going outside whenever you feel like it for exercise, and like the shops are relatively safe to go to because people are taking a lot of care.

Compared with if you're justifiably afraid to go outside where other people are mingling densely and without masks, while openly stating their attitude is that their unknown neighbours' health (yours) is just not that important, preventing spreading to you is not something they put any care into because they don't believe it's worth it, holding dense parties that host super-spreaders, and packing into shops and pressing up against you when you go there in a way that makes you feel like you're risking your life to get food, in a way that would be completely avoidable if only other people cared.

If happiness and freedom of movement is the high ideal, it still doesn't point towards one clear policy during pandemic, unfortunately.

I bet that many sweddish exerce their freedom of movement in the harsh and dark winter staying at home as many time as possible, specially those living at the upper half of the country :-)

>there is no answer to "how many deaths are worth it?"

And, in many cases, there may not be a clear answer to why outcomes were so good in Place A and so poor in Place B.

Previous peak was over 1000 new cases per day (7 day avg), currently at around 415, but was at 150-170 at the beginning of Sept. Well on their way, but still a ways off previous peak.

No real point in comparing case counts at such different times though. The previous peak was right when tests finally had opened up for essentially everyone in the Stockholm and some other regions starting from the first week of June. Previously only severely ill and essential workers could get tested.

The current case count is when everyone in the entire country can get tested without question. People at work having some easy sniffles get sent home and tested the same or next day to not have to substitute them for weeks on end.

The ICU and fatalities rate had already been peaked in early April and correlating the actual spread to those numbers the number of cases already have been trending down for some time.

Swedish public health agency data: https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/09f821667ce64bf7be6...

Also keep in mind, for the Swedish data the PHA takes time to have every case and death be allocated to the correct date, and not when they got the report.