Anybody here can explain to me exactly what the deal is with Sweden? I looked at a few articles and the wikipedia of COVID-19 in Sweden over the weekend and was surprised that nothing about their strategy deals with "well if we don't do anything we will have herd immunity". Instead I learned that "well the constitution tells we can't use a country wide quarantine and besides our citizens would not stand for it."
This left me rather 
Really? In that case it seems like Sweden is failing big time and not helping their citizens much at all compared to other European countries. I don't get it. Am I having a completely wrong read on Sweden? To me it looks like their government has done a much poorer job than anyone else on that continent.
This is accurate. We don't have any mandate in our constitution to do any national lockdown (in peacetime) as other european countries did. Initially, the response was very tentative, but at the same time when our neighbouring countries locked down, Sweden did put some restrictions into place, mostly regarding maximum attendance for public events and generally with a focus on protecting high-risk groups. A legal provision was made to enable the government to close all schools, but it was never used; instead only grades 10 through 12 and universities were closed and told to shift to remote teaching in mid-March.
After this, a lot of the mitigation for the spread has been based on voluntary actions by the population, in combination with strong recommendations (basically orders) for public places like restaurants. All government-owned museums have been closed and remain so for the time being. The Stockholm region had a fairly fast community spread, peaking in mid-to-late April. This also included a comprehensive spread into senior citizens' homes in the region, leading to a very high death rate (certainly higher than expected). The region's ICU capacity was at the very limit for a period of a couple of weeks, although a temporary ICU hospital was never brought online.
The biggest clusterfuck of the Swedish response has been the testing, which is really the only part of the "strategy" that has been the responsibility of the national and regional governments (the rest of the strategy and recommendations has entirely come from the apolitical Department of Public Health). The stated target was to scale up to test 100k people per week by mid-May, but this has been a colossal failure by means of miscommunication and blame gaming between regional coordinators. This month, after additional funding was provided by the national government, testing numbers are finally increasing. Last week, 74 076 people were tested, which is still only 3/4 of the goal that was supposed to be reached over a month ago. With the increased testing, we've also seen an increase in new cases reported, but these are to a very large extent mild cases because these weren't even registered before (only symptomatic people being admitted to hospitals were tested prior to this). So, our case numbers have seen a spike, but ICU admittal numbers and, crucially, death rates, are steadily coming down.
We'll see what the summer months will bring. There is still a general recommendation against traveling abroad, even to reopened countries, and most of the reopening countries are also making an exception by blocking Swedish travelers. All major amusement parks and concert venues are closed for the whole summer, so most big gatherings are still out of the picture. The national soccer league has restarted but are playing for empty stands.
