Here is the Swedish COVID death toll per million plotted against comparable countries in Northern Europe. Sweden is a clear outlier, and there is little debate that their lax strategy was the reason.
What are you suggesting exactly? That old people with medical issues are quarantined in empty hotels? So we can protect the civil liberties of those who are less vulnerable?
https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToS...
and in this list Sweden while very badly hit is no away an outlier amongst the most affected countries.
However, Sweden's infection rate is far higher than Denmark's.
Of course here we are comparing a fairly small data set. But fortunately our friends at Our World In Data have collected a nice graph of it:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-19-death-rate-vs-po...
As you can see, it's not easy to draw a trendline that would show that a higher population density would produce higher covid infection rate. Basically, the pattern is what you get from a shotgun.
Clearly Sweden is not the outlier, more the medium as the following are worse
Belgium, Spain, Bulgaria, Uk, Czech, France
Sweden has an urbanization rate of over 85% and if you only look at the density of the area where most of the population lives it's not that different from countries like Denmark or Austria and some degree to Germany.
But I agree with the point; urbanization rate in the sense of having lots of people using public transit might have significant bearance on the spreading of the epidemic, while population density in the sense of people/km² is utterly irrelevant.
Geographically it is not so important that there is a bit of sea between Sweden and Finland (Scandinavia vs. Fennoscandia); this sea used to be something that connects, not something that differentiates between the lands.
Because they argued that comparing Sweden to it's similar neighbour is "cherry picking", and yet cherry picked a much less suitable group - the whole of Europe - because it suited their argument.
Because they, without any facts, imply that Sweden's high death toll could be avoided by putting the elderly in hotels
You don't give a reason for why the whole of Europe is less suitable than it's immediate neighbours (geographic location is only a small part of the puzzle).
I didn't say the third one at all.
Catastrophic? They are pretty average for Europe. Cherry picking countries to compare it to makes little sense, as there are numerous factors other than geographical location that affect the virus. > 50% of the deaths occurred in care homes, as Sweden (like many other countries) sent older patients to them. Which is pretty much the opposite of what was I was suggesting.