So yes, most of the deaths would have happened anyway, but over a longer period of time. The improvement in treatments has not been substantial. Most of the deaths in Sweden were among high-risk groups, such as elderly people in care homes, who probably could not be saved if they got the virus today rather than several months ago.
Sweden intentionally set themselves up with a policy they can sustain for a long haul. They were betting that the pandemic will last a long time, certainly longer than a lockdown can be sustained.
In fact, Yes it does. Flattening the curve means that less people die because hospitals are unable to deal with a sudden flood of cases in a narrow period of time.
Moreover, as doctors have more time to focus into figthing against covid damage instead to give priority to just keep as many people alive as possible, sequels are also less serious
Less people died means that area under the curve represents a lower value now. The problem is that the common people are not always familiar with statistics. Both curves have a total area of 100 of course but this is a percent from a value. Not the value on itself. 50% of 10 is not the same as 50% of 3000.
> most of the deaths would have happened anyway
But not all of those, and this is a big difference
And remember Sweden has first class healthcare. A similar strategy in the US would have been absurdly expensive and resulted in mass bankruptcy in addition to mass deaths.
The metric that matters to me is this: what was the death rate, per capita, in a country during the entire duration of the pandemic?
Since the pandemic is not over yet, and may not be over for another year or even more, it is far to early to tell. We may still be in the first half of the duration of the pandemic.
So far.
Lockdown strategies will always look better than Sweden's strategy at the beginning, because Sweden's strategy gets most of the deaths over with in the first few months.
If a vaccine takes long enough, the countries that locked down might eventually catch up to Sweden's per-capita death rate, although it's worth noting that some of them have already surpassed it.
If you look at the charts here, you will see that Sweden had a big spike in deaths at the beginning of the outbreak and now it's daily death rate is far below that of most other countries: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/country/sweden?countr...
Sweden's approach looks better relative to other countries with every passing day. The longer it takes for a vaccine to be developed and distributed, the better Sweden's strategy will look. People who insist that Sweden made a horrible mistake are overconfident. Whether or not it was a mistake really depends on how long the pandemic lasts.