It's called the 'dry tinder' hypothesis, and it isn't born out when researchers look at the data, e.g.
As someone living in a neighbouring country, this is bullshit. They are perfect comparators. Basically exactly the same.
Sweden didn't lock down. Everyone else did. Ten times more people died in Sweden. End of story.
Plus, it just makes common-sense that if people cannot meet other people, that prevents the spread of the disease. No?
That makes common sense, and then we see 10x difference in deaths. The Occam's razor explanation for the reason of 10x bigger death rate then is .. lack of lockdown!
Anybody arguing otherwise seems suspect of political calculus, in my view.
I sat in the UK for weeks looking at what was happening in Italy and wondering why we weren’t doing anything at all.
I also thought it was interesting that the delta wave seemed to disappear in the UK without the benefit of lockdowns. The same in India. The same in India. I've been wondering if these waves of infections come and go without much regard for typical lockdown measures (outside of full-on communist China and New Zealand lockdowns, which may not be practical in most other places).
"U.S. (Civid-19) deaths in the week ending Monday totaled 7,225. By comparison, about 5,400 Americans died in the Pearl Harbor and 9/11 attacks combined. "
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/delta-driven-surge-in-us-e...
We don't limit comparison of Italy to Mediterranean countries, or England to British Isle countries.
Sweden is a European country.
On a European scale Sweden was right in the middle of the pack in deaths per capita.
In reality this argument is a form of motivated reasoning. It boils down to, if you ignore all the countries that disprove the hypothesis behind lockdowns and take a tiny number that did better than Sweden, then search backwards for some justification as to why this cherry picking is legitimate, you get a 'neighbours hypothesis' that unfortunately has to ignore some of the neighbours.
It's just rationalizing by people who cannot accept that lockdowns failed, because if they accepted that they'd have to accept that academic expertise in general has failed. And not only failed. Failed in ways that were destructive and damaging.
People compare other countries to Australia and New Zealand and Singapore all the time to justify covid lockdowns and restrictions.
But in the case of Sweden a country that outright disproves effectiveness of covid restrictions you require the frame of reference to only be the specific neighboring countries to cherry pick to fit your narrative.
It's either monstrously nightmarishly disingenuous or completely boneheaded and clueless.
But when it comes to Sweden the one country that disproves their narrative it has to be just a neighboring countries.
It seems so disingenuous to me.
Also households look very different in Sweden compared to it's neighbours. The average household size is among the lowest in the world with a very high variability (in particular in poorer areas where large family groups live together and were also disproportionally hit by COVID). That probably had an outsize effect as to why Sweden managed as well as they did. Social distancing and personal space is also pretty much the norm in Sweden even during non-pandemic times.
The Swedish CDC also says they believe they've fared worse than Norway and Denmark because the last few flu seasons were very mild in the country. Looking at the excess mortality numbers for the last few years that does indeed seem to at least explain some of the difference (although the claim has been disputed by their Norwegian counterpart).
It's also notable that Sweden tends to do a little worse than their neighbours through every flu season when it comes to excess death. Maybe COVID also just exacerbated that effect somewhat?
I think that the factors influencing COVID spread are so complex that it is impossible to disentangle how effective any political measures were in all but the most general terms.
In the end I think it mostly came down to luck, where those countries that managed to avoid clusters and super spreader events or more infectious strands early on fared better.