Sweden, like many other countries, estimated that the virus was spreading very fast, too fast to contain, but also with low symptoms or lethality. The assumption was wrong, a lot fewer people had contracted it, and a high percentage had bad symptomps or died.

A lot of other countries had these assumptions too, but they reversed them when they got new information. Instead of the virus being unstoppable, it was succesfully stopped in many Asian countries.

For some reason, Sweden didn't change their policies much. Sweden has a good healthcare system, so not so many died compared to the number of infections. 14,000 deaths is a massive legacy. Some 10% of Swedes have had Corona. So if 10% of those get long covid, there can be one percentage of the population affected by that. The Estonia disaster is nothing compared to this. Sweden avoided the world wars as well. One would have to go pretty far back to find a catastrophe of these proportions.

Sweden's policy has been held by some American politicians as a success, something to emulate. No, it has been a failure.

UK and USA are doing badly as well. https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...