I'm not sure how wildly off the mark they were. Compared to other neighboring Scandinavian countries with similar demographics who implemented much stricter lockdown policies, Sweden's number of deaths per capita is much higher. It's nearly seven times higher than Norway's, for instance. Although the death rate is falling now, their rolling 7-day average of deaths per capita remains stubbornly high.
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Also, I don't quite understand these repeated efforts to deflect from the actual death rate by excusing it on the basis that so many of the deaths involved the elderly in care homes. Surely, whether the people died in homes or not they're still part of the overall death toll for the country and who's to say these deaths are not due in part to the lack of social distancing meaning that the people working in, making deliveries to or visiting the care homes had a higher level of exposure to the virus?
To me it's almost as if they're saying that the deaths of all these old people don't really matter (or count). For instance, you could look at the US and say, "You know, if we exclude deaths in New York, our per capita death rate in the country is not as bad." To me, it's highly disingenuous to just arbitrarily exclude a whole chunk of the deaths in your country and say it means the overall total is not really that bad.