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Why limited to neighboring countries though?

The fact is Sweden has no full quarantine and they have less infection rates and less fatalities per capita than many countries with full quarantine.

It's clear that full quarantine may not be effective.

Full quarantine is effective, almost tautologically so. If the virus is still increasing exponentially then whatever quarantine measures you do have in place simply aren't full enough yet. At the extreme end of a full quarantine, imagine everyone is prohibited from leaving their homes for any reason, and once a week someone in a fully sealed bunny suit comes by to drop off food for the week. That's a pretty darn full quarantine, and you better believe it'd be effective.

Fortunately, we don't need to go to such extreme measures to get the replication rate below 1, but my point is, that extreme measures absolutely do work. The virus isn't magic; it needs to spread through relatively close personal contact. If you eliminate personal contact and sharing of spaces entirely, it cannot spread at all.

Sure it's effective.

But is it more effective than simple washing hands and social distancing?

I think Sweden is proving that it's not.

Additionally short of what you're proposing...full total lockdown...the virus isn't going anywhere...it will be in society when we emerge from quarantine immunologically naeive ready for another wave of Corona.

You have to compare states with comparable population density, cultural norms and roughly comparable initial cases. Climate plays a huge role in how much people engage in potential infection prone activities. E.g. like being outside in parks, beaches.
Uk is on full quarantine. There are no cultural norms because there's no culture there at the moment.

It should have less than Sweden if quarantine is effective.

The question is: how many infections happened before the quarantine was established? In UK the quarantine was started way to late. That the UK has in common with Italy, Spain and France. But in all these countries, a massive infection rate has been drastically reduced by the quarantine.

In Sweden, there seem to have been only very few initial cases and the virus seems to be slow to spread there - it probably helps that Sweden is over 80% larger than the UK and has only 1/6 of the population. Also, at this time of the year it is much colder than the UK, less reason to be outside in big groups.

If you check the infection graphs, in the UK the quarantine finally seems to have an impact on the infection numbers, which stopped growing a while ago. Sweden still seems to have growing infection numbers.

It's still SPREADING at a more rapid rate in U.K. than Sweden on full quarantine.