Sweden failed with that part, yes. But what they got right was not locking down.
Universal lockdown, ignoring constitutional rights for a second, increases the proportion of at-risk individuals who must get sick before herd immunity is reached.
If you have a population of 100 people, the HIT is 20% (assume homogenous mixing), of which half your population is high-risk and half is low-risk, you can enforce universal lockdown and end up with 10 high-risk and 10 low-risk infections, or you can encourage just the at-risk to isolate and end up with like 18 low-risk and 2 high-risk. It should be self evident which course is better.
Unfortunately the world has been tricked into viewing “herd immunity” as a dirty word as opposed to an emergent phenomenom.
