That are lives saved. The more knowledge we have about the disease the easier is to treat it. Also, that measure has extended the lives of all the people that would have died months ago.
Gaining time has a lot of value.
> Sweden did; they're doing fine, and are basically over with it
No. A second wave is starting in Sweden. And, the father of a colleague died of Covid19, that is not "doing fine".
Sweden has had mixed results because has applied non-strong measures. Most companies are working remotely and there are strong safety nets for people to stay home if they feel sick. Even with that, it has been far from perfect, and it is far from over.
This. For all the debate about the Swedish approach, Sweden isn't really any better -- or worse -- off than comparable countries.
The one thing that could improve the situation is social distancing for an extended period of time, in combination with contact tracing and compulsory quarantining of contagious individuals. In that regard, Sweden dropped the ball completely along with the rest of the EU, when the EU decided tourism was more important than containing the pandemic.
How is that relevant? Say "5500 people died" if you want to make a real point.
The only "evidence" that countries that did worse in the first wave do better now seems to come from counties that decided that reducing testing is the easiest way to make the numbers look good.
Unless there is a miraculous breakthrough in vaccines, which seems unlikely in current year, this disease will be with us for the rest of your life. Just like the flu. If it works like other corona viruses, it will burn through the population kill off the people who are susceptible to it, and remain with us forever, just like HCoV-OC43 probably did in 1889 with the "Russian flu" of that day[0]. Nobody worries about that now.
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7252012/
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-05-15/corona...
Maybe we will live with strains of the virus forever, but that's not the problem. We have many diseases among us that are harmless in childhood and much worse later in live, but they are much more harmless both because people are exposed to them starting in early childhood, allowing them to build some immunity; and because vaccination is an option. That's a much more harmless situation than the initial outbreak ripping through a population that has never seen the virus.
I don't think the US, Brazil, UK or Turkey explicitly realized this or anything (Sweden did; they're doing fine, and are basically over with it). But ultimately getting it over with is probably going to look better in the long term.