World Happiness Report 2023 55 Second, we update our measurements of the upsurge of benevolence during COVID-19, showing that the very large increases in 2021 were largely maintained during 2022. In the third part, we present data on trust, benevolence, and life evaluations in Ukraine and Russia from 2010 to 2022. Finally, we provide a first look at new data for social connections and loneliness during 2022. COVID-19: Omicron changed everything except the role of trust At the core of our original interest in investigating international differences in death rates from COVID-19 was curiosity about the links between variables that support high life evaluations and those that are related to success in keeping death rates low. We found in our two previous World Happiness Reports that institutional and social trust were the only main determinants of subjective well-being that showed a strong carry-forward into success in fighting COVID-19. We are now able to add data for 2022, and thereby show what a different year it has been, with a continued role for institutional trust as almost the only unchanged part of the story. The data for 2022 reveal dramatically how much the combination of Omicron variants, widespread vaccination and changes in policy measures have combined to give a very different international pattern of death rates. We find continuing evidence that the quality of the social context, which we have previously found so important to explaining life evaluations within and across societies, has also affected progress in fighting COVID-19. Several studies within nations have found that regions with high social capital have been more successful in reducing rates of infection and deaths.43 Our earlier finding that trust is an important determinant of international differences in COVID-19 death rates has since been confirmed independently for cumulative COVID-19 infection rates extending to September 30, 2021,44 and we show below that this finding also holds for all of 2021 and for 2022. We capture these vital trust linkages in two ways. We have a direct measure of trust in public institutions, as described below. We do not have a measure of general trust in others for our large sample of countries, so we make use instead of a measure of income inequality, which has often been found to be a robust predictor of the level of social trust.45 Our attempts to explain international differences in COVID-19 death rates divide the explanatory variables into two sets, both of which refer to circumstances likely to have affected a country’s success in battling COVID-19. The first set of variables cover demographic, geographic, and disease exposure circumstances at the beginning of the pandemic. The second set of variables covers several aspects of economic and social structure, also measured before the pandemic, that help to explain the differential success rates of national COVID-19 strategies. The first set comprises a variable combining the age distribution of each country’s population with the age-specific mortality risks46 for COVID-19, whether the country is an island, and an exposure Photo Humphrey Muleba on Unsplash
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