Wow that visualisation is awful.

The UK, Belgium, France, Spain, etc are all neighbors of Sweden. It's ridiculous to isolate Scandinavia. We don't do that with any other region in the planet. At any rate, their Covid deaths have been at near zero per day for over 3 months now. They're living life. They aren't cowering in fear from a virus with an extremely high survival rate.

> The UK, Belgium, France, Spain, etc are all neighbors of Sweden. It's ridiculous to isolate Scandinavia.

the population density, demographics, intergenerational living, and healthcare are vastly different between Scandinavia and the rest of Europe.

For example, Sweden has a density of 25/km2, while Belgium has 383/km2. The Stockholm county, the worst hit, has less population density than Lombardy (360/km2 vs 420/km2), while Lombardy has more inhabitants than the whole of Sweden. You can easily see how population density relates closely with the intensity of the epidemic[0]. See also household size[1]

The one _really_ doing well is Germany.

But as I said: Sweden's choice may have been perfectly good for Sweden! It just doesn't translate as-is to all countries, because each country is different.

Anyway, the problem was never the survival rate, but the overloading of ICU, if that is less likely to happen you'd do very well to not have a lockdown, but this was not and is not the case everywhere.

[0] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/D...

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...