The fact is Sweden lies in middle of the Eurozone pack. It had low excess mortality in recent years, which left many very old people likely to die of/with Covid if they were not protected. I'm not switching topics to defend Sweden's policy. My note was about pop. density.
If you want to go at it about Sweden vs. other countries in Scandinavia, we can take it to Twitter:
https://twitter.com/geenlid/status/1360771792105730049 (thread)
https://twitter.com/jhnhellstrom/status/1354051901751484419 (radial excess mortality plot)
But at the bottom of the Nordics: It is somewhat suggestive that none of Sweden's direct neighbours show significant excess mortality in 2020...
Finland is a hot mess on all health stats.
Norway has done better but also disavowed lockdowns.
Also, I wonder what you mean by Norway disavowing lockdowns? Because they did institute fairly strict measures on March 12, eventually going so far as forbidding people to travel to their cabins to avoid putting strain on rural infrastructure.
Was there some sort of public disavowal after the fact?
Not sure if there's something better, I just clicked through https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-deat... via 'Change country'.
As the graphs can be misleading due to the different scaling of the y-axis depending on the country, I also pulled the data and did my own analysis, eg comparing 'Sweden' against 'all Nordics' and 'all Nordics but Sweden'.
For Denmark, Finland and Norway combined, there were fewer deaths at the beginning of the year compared to the previous 5-year average, and a bit more deaths in April and May - basically a wash, ie 'no worse than the flu'.
The situation in Sweden is different, with significant excess mortality.
In any case, Swedish doctors knew not to abuse ventilators, as did doctors in many other places. This point got lost in the usual assumptive attack on Sweden, but it's the only reason I mentioned that country. A friend in biotech talked to an ER doc in Stockholm who confirmed that they would never intubate + vent on a closed system, as NYC hospitals apparently did in an unethical attempt to control spread.
I am curious where did you git this from? In the spring 2020 COVID patients in New York City ICUs were intubated not to control spread of the virus (there were many more actively shedding virus patients on regular hospital floor) but to sustain patients' life when their oxygen saturation drops dangerously low. Some patients were so bad that they were put on ECMO. Putting people on a ventilator was not an issue in itself, it is keeping them on ventilator for weeks on time that was problematic.