The masks may have fallen when it comes to the COVID-19 pandemic, but it has not resulted in any joyous celebration. We humans live by stories with clear cause-and-effect relationships.
An action leads to a certain result, and through these patterns, we create order in a world that often feels difficult, complicated, maybe even threatening. There are many good books on how we humans love narratives and are bad at statistics. A good story about an individual always wins over statistical probabilities. This also includes a certain nostalgia; things were better in the past.
Looking back at the early days of the pandemic, and even later, we see that there were several different stories but with the same basic logic. Through clear relationships and approaches, things would get better. There was talk of herd immunity, flattening the curves, then great hope was placed on vaccines. Today, we see that the different strategies and the stories around them have also been incorporated into other narratives. The new and unusual creates news and interesting stories.
Sweden took a slightly different path with the pandemic. The story about it has ended up somewhat messy with whether state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell would get a top job at WHO, on whose initiative, and how. This somewhat anticlimactic end to the story of one person’s employment will still be part of the narrative of how Sweden handled the pandemic for the entire nation. Not a completely fair or relevant comparison. Similarly, we see that China is currently applying strict “lockdowns,” where the strategy and story of how to handle the pandemic are based on the “zero strategy.” Behind the strategies and the different ways of handling the pandemic are not only different views based on strictly medical considerations, but there is also a significant influence from both socio-political structures and systems.
For us, the responsibility is now largely on the individual. One problem with this is that people, before making their decisions, want to hear facts and have an understanding of the risks. We have a lot of facts, though it must be said that we probably don’t have enough, given how new the COVID-19 pandemic is. A possible lack of facts is still a minor problem compared to assessing risks. As mentioned, we are bad at probability. Facts have also shown to be insufficient when it comes to healthy behavior.
Firstly, we perceive what it means to get sick in very different ways. News coverage closely followed COVID-19 death rates. Now that “half the population” has been infected at some stage, there are many individual stories about more or less mild variants. It becomes harder to determine what is reliable information. Is COVID as dangerous as driving a car, or is it like flying? What are the risks we take in everyday life without reflecting on them, and when do we consider the risks?
The answers to how risky something is do not come from individual stories, no matter how much we want them to and how much they speak to us. Fundamentally, pandemics must still be viewed from a broad public health perspective at the population level, not through the individual stories of people. Unfortunately, this process is very slow. We currently have statistics from 2020, published last December. Information on mortality in 2021 will be available in December this year.
For 2020, Statistics Finland shows the same top usual causes of death as before, with cardiovascular diseases, tumors, and memory diseases being the most common. Three-quarters of the deaths were due to these diseases, over 42,000 people. The “world’s happiest people,” the sad figures for suicides, accidents, and alcohol-related causes of death, were slightly fewer than the previous year. They were still internationally high, totaling 4,700, and large compared to the COVID-19 pandemic, which accounted for 558 deaths. COVID was behind one in a hundred deaths in Finland in 2020. Perhaps that is not the perspective one gets from the news coverage we have lived with?
From a public health perspective, I think it is time to once again try to bring the fight against major public health diseases back to the agenda. Of all Finns over 30 years old, 63 percent of women are overweight (BMI over 25 kg/m2) and 72 percent of men. Obese (BMI over 30 kg/m2) are 28 percent of women and 26 percent of men. Maybe the discussion about the welfare areas and the municipalities’ responsibility for health promotion in everyday life can be an opportunity to return to the less dramatic but more deadly issues than the COVID-19 pandemic? They still have some topical value, at least as organizational entities.
This article by Georg Henrik Wrede was previously published in Swedish on Kommuntorget.
Georg Henrik Wrede 