It's worth noting that Sweden is actually more strict than a number of states in the US - 50 person limit on any gatherings, and that limit applies to restauran

It's worth noting that Sweden is actually more strict than a number of states in the US - 50 person limit on any gatherings, and that limit applies to restaurants as well. They were also better positioned than almost any country to potentially tackle the pandemic well - wealthy, very high percentage of single person households, high percentage of jobs amenable to working from home, and yet their deaths per million rate is close to that of the US. That rate is also 5-10x that of their Nordic neighbors. What they did help show was that certain mixes of mitigation (vs suppression) measures could potentially keep R below 1 in certain places. But even there, because of a limited testing strategy, it was hard to confirm this for quite a while in Sweden. It would have been a lot more helpful if there'd been a lot more testing surveillance in Sweden, but alas.