The Sweden case, is interesting, but mainly need to be put in perspective. Some group (The kind who manifest with gun to end the lockdown) will claim that Sweden didn’t take any drastic measure to fight covid-19,they look at their number, and find them appealing ….
So let’s see what’s what …
Sweden is a pretty small country of northern europe, with some peculiar characteristic, first, the biggest agglomeration is their Capital, Stockholm, which is pretty small by any standard, the city itself have only 700k citizen, with suburb and la, 1,7 Million, some sector with more population density than other, so already we are far from Paris/London/New York in term of density.
They have by all account, a top tier public healthcare system, they heavily invested lately in it, good timing for sure, sometime luck can be on your side, so they have a deeper ressource to rely on than most country ….
Right now, most country/state closely monitor their number of hospitalized citizen(Covid or not), in each hospital/region/city, to be sure to always have a buffer, of bed, in case of an localized outbreak, the goal is clear, to have bed if we need them, a lot’s of place operate nearly at full capacity, even with strict social distancing, in those case, it would be foolish to take the Sweden tactic, right now.
Socially, the Swede have a cohesion that we could only wish for, they have confidence in their government, they have very strong social norms about not putting others at risk, and want to do their part to help . So the Swedish government surely use those specific trait to their advantage, for sure.
They still have some measure of social distanciation, gathering of more than 50 people are banned, high school, colleges and universities are closed, they evidently urged people over 70 years old to isolate themself, but this is pretty much it, no real coercition by the government, but this is probably where social cohesion is helping a lot.
So all in all, those specific trait, surely contributed to counter a catastrophe, but still, they still have more dead per capita than their neighbouring counterpart, so it’s not all perfect…
Right now all data point that their economy will contract as much as their neighbours, so the argument of “WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF” is dubious at best, inhuman at worse, government have some capacity to mitigate economic problem, for a time at least.
Now i’m not saying that some targeted reopening, with measure, and a lot of testing, is not possible, it’s surely is, but until the testing capacity is available, it’s hard to see an opening in a lot of sector, for sure ….
Everybody is flying blind right now, there’s no certainty, we know a little bit more on the virus, each day, some strange symptom, not only affecting older people, but kid, like Kawasaki syndrome, or some anormal stroke event, for the 30-40, those report are still the exception, but are likely to happen more, when more people gets infected, it’s not the kind of stuff we should take lightly …
So all comparison between Sweden and the US should be taken with a grain of salt, the US simply don’t have the same social cohesion, and is a more individualistic society, with not public healthcare, and a generally less healthy population, with a lot of densely populated area…