Thanks for the source! And I'm not saying I'm 100% right but I do remember reading articles from the economist and other solid publications about them not having any restrictions. I won't be able to find the article but I will look...and also look at this one.

/edit I actually found this in my bookmarks fyi: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01098-x

> edit I actually found this in my bookmarks fyi: https://archive.ph/7y7gF

But Tegnell is the architect and main proponent of the historical revisionism that I'm talking about. He is the man at the center of the controversial policies.

Even while they were being enacted, Sweden was fed a narrative of exceptionalism by Tegnell and the mainstream media, who never mentioned the comparative liberality of the other Nordic states' policies, and maintained the fiction that we were still following the most liberal strategy (even to this day).

Tegnell is massively popular in Sweden. In fact, as deaths accumulated and it looked more and more like he was following a disastrous path, his popularity increased exponentially.

Criticism or even mildly questioning Tegnell was (and for a large part, still is) totally off-limits: there is absolutely no way I'd mention my doubts about him or his policies to my fellow Swedish colleagues or friends.

edit: Incidentally, for those who can read Swedish (or use Google Translate), this series of contemporary articles is a really great overview of the events in Sweden seen from a skeptical perspective:

https://floderochtekoppar.blogspot.com/2021/09/sveriges-hant...

As a foreigner living in Sweden during covid was just bizarre. I certainly appreciated that school were kept open and that the country never went into complete lock down. However the making fun of masks at the highest level, because there hadn't been any definite studies that showed they work (and after the turnaround later they wondered why so few people put them on), or the policies for medical personal who were not allowed protective gear (because it scares patients) even for ones working directly in the covid wards.

And yes there is definitely a weird "Swedish exceptionalism", which interestingly Swedes from all sort of political persuasion exhibit.

Well, even now, many years later there is still no evidence that mask mandates reduced covid infections. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/21/opinion/do-mask-mandates-...

From the analysis I saw in Sweden, the conclusions was that the wast majority of deaths were caused by failures in the elderly care. The pandemic spread like wildfire by the overworked personal who did not get protective gear or time to keep health standards. Some did not even have time to wash their hands between patients. The wast majority of housing for elderly is also located near the capital, similar to Copenhagen in Denmark, resulting in major hot spots for the virus. The government body responsible for supervision and control over healthcare also came to the conclusion that care for the elderly had critical flaws during the pandemic, with only half of patients meeting a doctor in person and as high as 1/5 of patients never even got to talk to a doctor.

None of the international discussions about restrictions has been about restrictions around elderly care. Sweden did actually issue some, which some described as prison-like for those impacted, but that was about a year into the pandemic. It was also seen as too late, with vaccine and proper staff/gear/protocols being more effective tools.

The Oxford Stringency Index doesn't correlate in any way with COVID deaths so it's unclear what point you're getting at here. None of the NPIs had any effect on COVID.