But isn't that the point? They accepted more deaths up front, but over the long-run those countries should average out about the same per capita, while Sweden avoided immediate negative social/economic impacts.

South Korea avoided negative social/economic impact and has 5 deaths/M, so we know for certain that it’s not impossible.

South Korea was extraordinarily well prepared, and it is yet to see if they'll be able to keep this up with international travel resumed.

I am extremely pessimistic about any country's ability to usefully maintain low infection rates while opening up international travel again. Sweden isn't close to being able to do this in terms of tech infrastructure or cultural mindset.

(That being said, if anyone is going to do it successfully long term, it's going to be south korea)

> South Korea was extraordinarily well prepared

As the western world could've been, too, but we just... weren't.

"It's not my fault I failed the exam, I didn't study!"

We actually don't know that. Korea has avoided it, for now. People were saying the same thing about Japan and Singapore. But both had outbreaks that flared up. They'll have to keep doing what is working until a vaccine occurs or the disease dies.

But even if its possible to prevent an massive outbreak that doesn't mean its possible to undo a massive outbreak. Korea has prevented large scale community spread by testing and tracing. That has been a successful and preventing an outbreak. But nobody has ever successfully used it to remove a virus from a population after it was already widely in the population.

Perhaps. Hopefully! It's too early to know the final counts, though, which is why there is still scope for controversy.

That is blatantly not true. In the long term we'll have either a vaccine or antiviral drugs, and won't have that huge amount of unnecessary deaths.

We won’t get either before lockdowns become infeasible to continue.

Lockdowns are not binary, you can have partial lockdowns.

As stated by others, they are further along in the pandemic in terms of number of people infected. They also have rather large long term care homes and more than half their deaths are in those.

We won't know if that is a winning strategy until a year from now but there is a strong appeal in having not locked everything down. They will be resuming football games with fans and everything at their large stadiums come June.