>> How is 4.500 dead, beeing worldwide #1 in deaths pr capita 2 weeks running, allround #7 in deaths and climbing, not qualify as catastrophic?

Looking at graphs of excess deaths compared to previous years the graph for Sweden is pretty much identical to most Europen mainlaind countries. It spikes at the same time, and it goes down at about the same rate at the same moment, which is when the governments of some countries went into lockdown, while Sweden just advised social distancing etc. But the effect was pretty much the same as e.g. here in the Netherlands, Belgium, parts of Germany, France, Switzerland, etc.

I get this feeling some people really want to rake Sweden over the coals because their policy is supposedly 'killing more people', but the numbers only show this when you compare against direct neighbors, and not at all when you compare to EU mainland countries. Coincidentally, Sweden was one of the first countries that had its first confirmed cases, way before other countries, and way before everyone realised this was going to get bad. So it's very likely that the high number of early infections that went undetected lead to a later spike similar to countries in mainland EU, and, as a result of that, similar statistics in terms of excess deaths. Other nordic countries may have dodged the bullet simply by virtue of a having a little more time before the exponential increase in infections started to get out of hand.

Also (and this seems to be an unpopular opinion around here), maybe we should accept the fact that a certain number of deaths/capita will be inevitable, even for those countries like Norway/Denmark etc, at least in their more densely populated areas. Countries like Netherlands and Sweden had a big spike where many people died in a short time, the vast majority being old (80+ year old) people and people with one or more comorbidities. In the past three weeks, the excess deaths here have been negative compared to other years, and if you look at the area under the graph for total excess deaths for this year so far, it's not that much higher than for the 2018 flu season, which was a much lower spike but it lasted for much longer. It's very likely that over the next months, barring a vaccine, excess deaths in countries that have very few corona fatalities so far will go up and linger higher for a long time.

There was a study posted here recently that showed a very high correlation between the chance of dying from corona now and the 'normal' (ie: before-corona) chance of dying in the next year, through different age groups, health risk factors and some other variables. I think it's fair to say we have to wait for at least one or two years before we can draw any conclusions at all about which countries handled this right and which didn't, or if it even mattered at all. One data point that indicates that maybe there wasn't really a way to prevent all these deaths, is that when you compare countries where the number of hospitalized corona patients spiked similarly before any measures were taken, it seems there is next to no difference in the progression of infections and deaths between countries with ultra-strict lockdown measures and countries that were a little less strict. Things like face masks, closing schools or banning outside activities appear to have had no effect whatsoever.