There are a bunch of things that work in Sweden's favor in this case.

Looking at Stockholm, hardest hit in Sweden, numbers from 2014 said that 45% of the people had moved there from elsewhere, and since then more and more people have moved here. For people moving within Sweden, that usually means leaving their parents in their hometown, which makes it very easy to avoid having contact with them as soon as everyone realized how serious this is.

Another factor is that in Sweden there's always been a distance between the older generation and the younger. Since preschools and after-school care is inexpensively available to everyone, you don't need to rely on grandparents watching their grandchildren. People who live in Stockholm and have the grandparents here may arrange for them to pick up the kids a couple of days a week, but as I said above, a lot of people don't even have the grandparents in Stockholm. It's been reported as a problem for a long time that a lot of old people live alone in Sweden and lack social contacts. In this specific case that may actually be a good thing!

People usually live in households with two parents and one or two children, or alone in single households. The areas that have been hardest hit in Stockholm have been poorer suburbs with a high amount of immigrants, and it's a lot more common in these areas to live many generations in the same small apartment. Unfortunately, this means that the virus is easily transmitted from the children to the grandparents. Outside of the largest cities, it's very common to live in a house, which makes it easy to keep your distance to the neighbors.

Swedes have been accused for a long time of being socially distant already. A Swedish wedding will never compare in number of guests with a Turkish or Indian wedding. There's an old joke that if you leave your apartment and hear someone else in the stairs leaving theirs at the same time, you wait a while so you don't have to talk to them. People make an effort to not meet people, in contrast with socially warmer cultures.

Even before the virus, people would fill subway cars in Stockholm by using one of four seats for themselves, and you'd stick out if you shared a four-seat group with someone if there was an empty group of four seats available. I talked to international colleagues before all this started, and they were surprised that no one wanted to do small talk in the subway. They came from cultures where it was expected that you sit down next to the only other person in the subway car and started talking to them, while in Sweden that would make you seem like a drunk or a crazy person. The social distance is built in.

Also, no tradition of kissing on the cheek. Hugs are common between friends, and handshakes when you meet new people, but no kissing. I have a feeling this would be more common in Italy and Spain, as well as multi-generational gatherings.

All that said, it's way too early to say that everything is going to be fine in Sweden. I hope it is, but we're still in the unknown part of this. We still have a lot of people who live in cramped conditions in certain areas, and we had issues with the bus companies using fewer buses in Stockholm when all this started which led to overcrowding.