"Needless to say, most Western health authorities have not yet acknowledged that their entire approach to the pandemic has been a complete failure."

Don't hold your breath for that one...

Similar outcome has been observed in an area local to me as well. Los Angeles county has had mask mandates and other measures going back to the Delta variant, while the neighboring Orange County did not. Yet, LA nearly always had higher incidences of new cases.

https://covidactnow.org/us/california-ca/county/orange_count...

Second worst in Europe, way worse than the more comparable Norway, Denmark and Finland is not any sort of vindication at all.

There will be no introspection about this. Ordinarily, the theory that “maybe Sweden had the right approach to X” would get serious consideration from serious people. But politics has completely broken the objectivity of the global professional class. Sweden’s approach can’t be right because it overlaps too much with what conservatives are saying. There will never be a serious analysis of whether variance in covid death rates can be explained mainly by age, obesity, population weighted density, and a few other factors unrelated to lockdowns and masking measures.

This should be really distressing to everyone, because we really do need experts. The people who are protesting mask mandates may be right, but for the same reason as broken clocks are sometimes correct. We need good experts who place their professions above politics and political considerations. We need experts who aren’t afraid to take positions just because the “bad people” take the same position. We don’t have that right now.

Anecdote: I was having a conversation with a public health expert and mentioned that Fauci was overly cautious and not very good at his job. He said I “sounded like a Trumper.” That’s the knee jerk response in the circles where I travel (blue states, highly educated professionals). These are smart people who have a lot of intellectual horsepower. But smart people can get caught up in groupthink. And they’ve been sucked into this groupthink that makes them constitutionally incapable of seriously considering a position that would result in them agreeing with Donald Trump about anything.

I don't think comparing two datapoint (sweden vs austria) is enough to reach a conclusion.

Also.... why compare with austria? Why not with neighboring Finland? It's well known that temperature is a huge factor on spreading of covid.