You absolutely cherry picked the countries in that list. If Estonia is there so should be Lithuania and Latvia (to which Estonia is much more comparable economically and to a large degree socially than to the Nordic countries). And if Germany is there so should be Austria and Switzerland (small, highly developed and not that much less densely populated than Sweden if you only look at the areas where most people live) and so should France & UK (smaller populations than Germany, similar level of economic development).

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.

It would be interesting to determine the effects of things like population density and urbanisation on the death rate. Sweden is a pretty sparsely populated country I think, which presumably acts to reduce the rate of spreading?

Sweden has a population density and urbanisation rate that is somewhat higher than Norway or Finland, but Denmark is far more dense.

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.

Population density is a red herring on it's own. Spain has a relatively low population density, but the cities are probably some of the most dense in Europe. Likewise 1/3 of Swedes live in cities, while there are huge areas that are very sparsely populated in the north.

You should add more countries to your chart https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToS...

Clearly Sweden is not the outlier, more the medium as the following are worse

Belgium, Spain, Bulgaria, Uk, Czech, France

All of these countries are not the right baseline to compare against. Funny, how positive shutdown results are hand waved away with population density and so on, while Sweden never gets compared against the other Scandinavian countries Finland and Norway. I know Finland is not technically Scandinavia, but a better to compare Sweden against than Denmark.

Population density calculated is not really a meaningful measure if you want to figure out how "densely" most people in the country live and it's completely useless in this case.

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.

On the other hand, currently the covid infection rates in Sweden are flaming red in the sparsely populated Gävleborg and Västernorrland counties which you can hardly describe as "urbanized". The counties in Finland (Österbotten and Sadakunda), across the Bothnian Gulf on the same latitudes, have higher population density, but have not had this high infection rates, at least so far.

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.

Why is it better to compare Sweden against Finland, which is not Scandinavia, than to Denmark, which is?

Similar population density, similar climate, similar lifestyle. Denmark is to far south and to small for that. Denmark more closely resembles, say, Belgium or some northern states in Germany.

Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Iceland form an entity that has shared history, culture, legislation and many other traits that make them comparable. For decades, the legislation, regulation etc in the countries has been developed together (often with Sweden as the progressive model that others are following, though that has now turned around a bit).

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.