Why would you normalize by population in the early stages of an epidemic? If you assume a large and small country both have similar growth rate and number of initial cases, then their absolute case growth will be similar in the early stages. But the large country will appear "better" once you normalize for population. This is exactly the pattern I see when you compare Sweden to its smaller neighbors.
Why would you assume a large and small country both have similar number of initial cases? I'm under the impression a lot of the nordic initial cases were travelers coming home from ski trips in Italy. That ought to scale pretty linearly with population.
Whether the virus is permeating is the point. If the virus has broadly spread across society, and it sounds like we're agreed that it has, then you have to normalize by population to get useful numbers.
