So I guess my point is - you can't factor out those 10x people. Because they are dead.
The idea is that since the first wave and them changing their stance slightly - Sweden is not performing an order of magnitude worse than Norway and Finland, and it's pretty average compared to the rest of Europe - and definitely doing better than Russia.
I think it still begs the question that those patients could have been saved, but it is not trying to say that old people don't count. More, that the full lockdowns didn't really protect them, by themselves. As seen in NYC, where it is fairly heavily believed that any good the lockdown did was more than offset by sending patients back into nursing homes.
As they learned more about the virus and adapted their death rate per capita dropped to be on par with Europe..while still maintaining looser restrictions.