Except influenza is nowhere near spreading as fast. If let unchecked, many millions of people would be dead - this has been avoided only by control measures, and we're not past it yet.

If it's similar seasonality to Spanish flu, expect 4 waves. This is start of the second wave, likely biggest.

Sweden coped fine with minimal intervention from the government.

The rest of your comment is pure speculation. It now seems to be the given narrative that there will be a second wave despite coronaviruses having different characteristics from flu. I would argue that the current second waves in Europe are really the first wave continuing after lockdown restricting were lifted (plus a lot more testing). The number of deaths isn't rising much.

> Sweden coped fine with minimal intervention from the government.

Did it, though? https://web.archive.org/web/20201008174215if_/https://www.ec...

> If let unchecked, many millions of people would be dead - this has been avoided only by control measures, and we're not past it yet.

This is an unfalsifiable claim, considering that virtually every country has done something to inhibit spread. It's also meaningless, because nobody is saying that nothing should be done to inhibit spread.

The question is, what should be done? How many people-years can we realistically save, and at what cost? Every year, almost 3 million Americans will die of any cause. If we take a CFR of 0.4%, and a "herd immunity" threshold of 70%, the upper bound of deaths in the US from COVID-19 is under a million. The average age of a COVID-19 fatality is higher than life expectancy, which means that half of these deaths would've occured under any circumstance, in the near future. We can see high excess mortality right now, but we haven't seen how that translates into lowered mortality in the future.

Sweden would be the control for the hypothesis, and while it wasn't no measures, there was no lockdown.