> the US that was mostly locked

the US was not mostly locked down, and indeed made noncompliance with safety measures a major partisan identity issue for the faction controlling the federal executive, the upper federal legislative house, most state governments, and much of law enforcement even in the other states. It mostly had modest, inconsistent, uncoordinated, and largely unenforced restrictions. A few jurisdictions did at least nominal lockdowns for fairly brief periods (California did twice, though virtually every county sheriff had publicly announced that they either would not enforce orders at all or would do so only by education around compliance by the time of the second one near the end of 2020.)

Fixed mostly to relatively. That wasn't my main point really. I thought the data points were interesting.

Sweden's early success with their 'herd immunity' experiment was short lived.

They failed to actually achieve 'herd immunity' and did not avoid the eventual virus death toll:

https://www.news.com.au/world/coronavirus/global/sweden-cris...

By comparison Finland, it's neighbor took a much stricter approach and never reached the same level of death.

Finland: 931 deaths at 168 per million with a 1.0% death rate.

https://epidemic-stats.com/coronavirus/finland

Sweden: 14275 deaths at 1406 per million with a 1.4% death rate.

https://epidemic-stats.com/coronavirus/sweden

Can we then talk about the economic disruption felt by each respectively compared to the 0.4% difference in death rate? I don’t have insights into either county.

Here are the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) figures for these two countries:

Sweden: https://tradingeconomics.com/sweden/gdp-growth-annual

Finland: https://tradingeconomics.com/finland/gdp-growth-annual

Looking at those charts they show very similar economic outcomes for the two countries.

Of the last 4 COVID effected quarters Finland won two and Sweden won two.

And Sweden actually felt the highest quarterly contraction at -7.7% compare to the -6.1% for Finland.

That 0.4% difference in death rate is measuring survivability as it records the chance of dying from the virus.

That 0.4% difference suggests Finland's health system was better than Sweden's at handling the virus, as your chances of dying were much less.

When it comes to actual deaths Finland was doing over 830% better (i.e. 168 per million compared to 1406 per million) than Sweden.

Edit: Fixed my bad math. My 90% better figure was out by a factor close to 100.

The more cases you have, the more overwhelm your testing system is. The difference in death rate is most probably due to the fact that Finland was testing more positive cases (relatively) to Sweden.

Note it death rate of infected, if you have less infected the death rate should be unaffected as long as you have enough resources to treat everyone equally well.

That data is either wrong or severely outdated. The Economist website [1] has Sweden's excess deaths per 100k at 102 (not 13). While better than the US -- which was also not really locked down as other commenters state -- it is 5x worse than neighboring Finland, and infinitely worse than neighboring Norway and Denmark (which had negative excess deaths during the pandemic).

[1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...

I would not typify the US as "mostly locked down"

Indeed, and Sweden also had the benefit of the lockdowns in the rest of Europe. I don't think you can compare Sweden to the entirety of the US. A single state maybe.

Would you typify the US as more Locked Down than Sweden? Because their numbers are better. If their approach was worse why are their numbers not worse?

I've heard it suggested that there was a lot of voluntary distancing and othet measures taken in sweden. It wouldn't suprise me if there was more actual distancing in "not locked down" sweden than in "locked down" US. But perhaps the protests etc I've seen on TV wetrre exagerated?

Fewer travellers in and out of Sweden.

Simple. US has obesity as a significant comorbidity factor.