As you know if you’re Swedish, Expressen (a major newspaper here in Sweden) exploded these myths about the supposed demographic differences between Sweden and Norway by comparing the sparsely populated northern region of Sweden with its Nordic neighbors and it still had more than FIVE times the death rate.
The two countries are different, that was my point.
I'm not saying the Swedish approach is the most preferable, I'm saying cherry-picking Norway on some hand-wavy "all nordic countries are entirely alike wrt pandemics and you cannot compare them to other countries" manner is not scientific. And selecting one part of that country is not going to work unless you match on all important factors.
The rigorous way to do this is: form a list of parameters that affect the pandemic, and then match on a large pool of countries to compare outcomes. Calibrate your system. You can't just cherry pick either way. I can say - well, Sweden has similar pop densities to Germany, and Stockholm is denser than Berlin so Swedish should be worse. But that's not rigorous, it's just confirmation bias at work.
In truth, we'll only know the outcomes when the pandemic is over - probably by 2022 for most countries - and then it'll be an extended argument over whether it was worth say the economic damage, mental health consequences, etc. etc. for any actual reduction in excess deaths.
As someone who comes from the UK but has now lived in Sweden for 20 years and has relatives in both Sweden and Norway, the supposed demographic gulf between the two countries (which Swedish people seem to have only noticed this year) is certainly not apparent to me. But I wonder if it’s worth all the downvotes saying so?
"How’s Sweden doing, you ask? More people have died of COVID-19 in the past 5 days than have died altogether in Norway throughout the entire pandemic.
Tegnell still hasn’t been fired."
(Sweden and Norway have similar populations, climate, and even language and culture, but very different COVID approaches)