Jan, indeed, the social optimization involved in this has many factors more than counting the dead per million, although that is by far the most important. The countervailing concerns are that the measures that a society implements must allow the surviving population to sacrifice not too great an amount of physical and non physical values. For example, a complete early lockdown that would have produced a smaller number of deaths could have significant mental health and youth development issues, severe economic consequences, as well as being antithetical to concepts of western liberalism. A country like Greece, for example, which can partially rely on its European Union allies for some assistance, can decide to take the economic risk because it has less to lose. Pillars of an alliance, like Germany, and countries less closely associated with an alliance, like Sweden, cannot afford to sacrifice as much economically to combat a pandemic that has this low a death rate. The pain of the survivors counts, despite that we cannot easily either measure it or weigh it against the number of deaths. But most visibly, as more countries reach worse numbers in deaths per million residents than Sweden, Sweden's response gets validated. That list presently includes Italy, Spain, Belgium, Great Brittain, and the US, with France not being that much better. We can reasonably say that of the leading Western democracies very few have done a significantly better job. Germany stands out as a success that is very much worth understanding, since it does not seem to have sacrificed much either economically or in terms of freedom of movement.
The big risk for Sweden was the emergence of a cure in April or May 2020. Then all the countries that did the early complete lockdown would avoid any additional deaths. The only treatment close to a cure that I have heard about is the Eli Lilly sequenced antibody, which, from its early trials, seems about twice as effective as plasma therapy without reaching anything close to 95% avoidance of hospitalizations. We should hope that its effectiveness is confirmed, and it comes to the market quickly and a yet better treatment develops.
I think the above mostly addresses Chritos's concerns too but let's try to build a complete optimization model, which takes into account the economic harm as well as non-economic harm people suffer from lockdowns. Preventing 100 deaths per million at the cost of 600 depression cases per million may not be the preferred path but let's try to estimate those figures.