Correct about Sweden. We can compare Sweden to Switzerland (8.5 million vs 10 mil pop in Sweden). Switz has 1870 deaths, Sweden 3460. Sweden is far worse per capita than it's small northern euro neighbors too (actually deaths per million, Sweden, then Norway, Finland, Denmark are (343) and (42, 51, 92). IHME [1] estimates Sweden will have 5760 deaths, Switz 1935. Correcting for relative populations (10/8.5) Switz's 1935 * 10/8.5 = 2275 roughly expected.

I'm not sure why people have seized on Sweden as doing it right, but they will kill about 3.5k extra people compared to Switz (excess deaths). Compared to their northern neighbors they about 8x worse.

All this info at https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ except projections.

[1] https://covid19.healthdata.org/switzerland

Density in Sweden is 64 per square mile while in NY state its 421 per square mile. However, much of the population live in cities such as Stockholm that has population density 12,800 per square mile compared to 66,940 for NYC.

If the dire high hospitalization and high death rate theory underlying lockdown was true, you would without lockdown expect worse than NYC death rates in Stockholm because it is very dense and we don't see that.

Moreover, wouldn't number of social contacts rather than population density be a better metric here? Population density is normally a proxy for number of social contacts, but NYC is in lockdown while Sweden is not.