World Happiness Report 2023 59 and personal hygiene as the main defences available during this new endemic phase. As expected, the results of our COVID-19 modelling are dramatically different before and after the appearance of Omicron at the end of 2021. Our earlier modelling showed a similar structure for 2020 and 2021. In our new results, we thus combine 2020 and 2021, and compare that to a separate equation for 2022. As shown in Table 2.3, the disappearance of an effective elimination strategy means that there were only two significant variables still in play in 2022. The first is the level of institutional trust, which has retained most of the importance that it had in the first two years of the pandemic. The second is a risk variable based on each country’s age profile, weighted by the estimated age-specific death rates, which are much higher in older populations. To show that these results adequately represent the global population, the results on the right-hand side of the table are weighted by each country’s share of the global population, and produce very similar results, as do estimates making use of estimates of excess deaths from all causes.63 The Nordic countries merit special attention in light of their generally high levels of both personal and institutional trust. They also had COVID-19 death rates only one-third as high as elsewhere in Western Europe during 2020 and 2021, 27 per 100,000 per year in the Nordic countries compared to 80 in the rest of Western Europe. There is an equally great divide in death rates, but not in trust, when Sweden is compared with the other Nordic countries, as shown in Figure 2.5. This difference shows the importance of a chosen pandemic strategy. Sweden, at the outset, chose64 not to suppress community transmission, while the other Nordic countries aimed to contain it. As a result, Sweden had much higher death rates in 2020-2021 than the other Nordic countries, while in the end being forced to adopt stringency measures that were on average stricter65 than in Photo Remy Baudouin on Unsplash
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