What’s frustrating is that the people who insist you should only compare Sweden to its Scandinavian peers are the same who insist that the US or Europe should u

What’s frustrating is that the people who insist you should only compare Sweden to its Scandinavian peers are the same who insist that the US or Europe should use have used remote islands in the Pacific as their pandemic model. This goes the other way too, of course - people who are keen to compare Sweden to the UK instead of Denmark cry foul whenever New Zealand is brought up. The problem though is that there’s no bulletproof explanation for why lockdowns were so effective in the rest of Scandinavia and less so elsewhere in Europe (or many American states for that matter). Without that, the counterfactual is still a bit of a question mark. If Sweden had adopted Denmark’s strategy, maybe they would’ve indeed come out looking like Denmark - or maybe they would’ve come out looking like the UK. Vaguely gesturing towards “they’re all Scandinavian” doesn’t have much explanatory power.