COVID is different because it is occurring against a backdrop of extremely aged and obese populations, in a year (2020) which followed a weak flu season (2019), and in an election year in the USA (2020) where all health decision were heavily politicised.
"In Sweden, the observed increase in all-cause mortality during Covid-19 was partly due to a lower than expected mortality preceding the epidemic and the observed excess mortality, was followed by a lower than expected mortality after the first Covid-19 wave. This may suggest mortality displacement."
Despite their hands-off measures legally, Swedes still socially distanced aggressively. The government has been encouraging people there to take active measures in a manner unlike during swine flu. So we are still comparing the spread, and damage from spread, of a virus where significant behavioural change/mitigation efforts were made, against a virus with significantly less efforts to mitigate it.
Except when discussing poor results in Sweden, then its because they congregated, held events and allowed the virus to spread. I’m not buying either of these no true swedesman arguments.
There's nothing to buy. Data exists for this. Go check out Google's data on people's movements. It went down in Sweden significantly. Maybe less than elsewhere, and that's a rabbit hole you can get lost in. But I think the point stands that it is not a one to one comparison.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.11.11.20229708v...
"In Sweden, the observed increase in all-cause mortality during Covid-19 was partly due to a lower than expected mortality preceding the epidemic and the observed excess mortality, was followed by a lower than expected mortality after the first Covid-19 wave. This may suggest mortality displacement."
Sweden had about the same mortality spike in 2009 from Swine flu: https://swprs.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/sweden-monthly-...