[IkmoIkmo]

In terms of excess death, those are correct interpretations. But a true measure of successful policy would've been some kind of death vs impact, corrected for difficult factor.

Death is what the article covers. Impact would be the cost of the policy on everything else, e.g. mental health due to lockdowns, kids' learning falling behind due to lockdowns, bankruptcies and debt due to lockdowns etc.

Some countries were able to get the same results with fewer strict lockdown measures of other countries, those countries can be said to be more successful.

Of course one could correct for difficulty factor. That's a gray area. For example, do you include Japanese culture of masking and rule abidance? Depends on your perspective. But in any case, it's clear that countries with for example an average age of 18 like Nigeria, will be less impacted as a country like Italy, where the average person is 46. Knowing 50% of the population is almost over 50, make a big medical difference. Similarly, countries with high population density will do better than countries with little population density, etc.

There's a ton of these factors that determine 'difficulty factor'. As such it's hard to really say who did well and who didn't.

But no, Sweden wasn't a disaster. Australia and Germany did quite well, but Australia had some harsh measures that must be taken into account. Brazil indeed wasn't the worst of the bunch (although a top-25 spot is certainly not a good look, especially as only one other country in that list of 25 (Russia) has more absolute deaths, and outside the top 25 only the US has more, 600 thousand dead in Brazil is a disaster if you ask me, it's >10 years of homicides worth of death, in a country known for some of the worst gun violence and gang violence in the world.