I think the article that said Sweden was hit just as bad was referring to Q1, and they expected it to be worse Q2 which it wasn't.
The exact opposite actually
"Sweden’s laissez faire approach does appear to have minimized the economic damage compared with its neighbors in the first three months of the year, according to an assessment by the International Monetary Fund."
This would make sense, the economic impact in Q1 was mostly because of voluntary shutdown, as time goes on it's mostly mandated shutdown doing the damage.
This makes no sense to me. Q1 would have the least impact on Sweden compared to others, as only March could possibly impact the economy, and they pretty much stayed open compared to other countries. Q2 Norway and Denmark reopened while Sweden remained sideways.
More from the article - this isn't some random prediction by an outsider, this is literally each country's central bank full year forecast:
"Sweden’s central bank expects its economy to
contract by 4.5% this year, a revision from a previously expected gain of 1.3 percent. The unemployment rate jumped to 9 percent in May from 7.1 percent in March. “The overall damage to the economy means the recovery will be protracted, with unemployment remaining elevated,” Oxford Economics concluded in a recent research note. This is more or less how damage caused by the pandemic has played out in Denmark, where the central bank expects that the economy will
shrink 4.1% this year, and where joblessness has edged up to 5.6 percent in May from 4.1 percent in March.
....
Norway’s central bank predicts that its mainland economy — excluding the turbulent oil and gas sector — will
contract by 3.9% this year."
