Can we see Silver lining during the Covid time ?
Happiness Vs Fear Vs Governance. This story relates to many things and data can speak for itself.
(Contributors Sagar Dispaksinh Gahalod, Sosuke Taguchi, Evjol Venari, Thiyagarajan Sivaraj, Ayesha Temuri — BBS DataScience-2021)
This story is about Ex ante and Ex-post of Covid 19 in relation to happiness of people in the selected nations.
The fear, death and governance had been impacted by Covid 19. From the data below we can see how drastically the happiness of people have changed for developed nations of Europe.The data shows covid has a significant effect on their definition of death and fear. However it did not significantly changed the way they see happiness.
How the meaning of happiness has changed before and during covid for the five nations are shown in the below graph.
This is an attempt to find the happiness level and factors affecting the happiness of people across various countries in Europe during the COVID-19 pandemic. The hypothesis is that people will be less happy and to analyse the factors which impacted the decrease in happiness along with the COVID-19 virus.
However, happiness index data showed surprising results. In less than half of the countries that were chosen for the happiness index there is an upward movement with Germany standing out followed by Italy in terms of percentage increase in happiness. Remaining half of the chosen countries showed the expected decrease in the happiness index.
Since people were concerned about their lives and the lives of their loved ones and staying at home increased mental stress and depression. The scenario is the same for most of the European nations.
So what factors affect the happiness level in particular during the COVID-19 scenario?
There are few factors which we analyse in our story are useful to determine people’s happiness.
The fear of Covid among people is because of poor Governance, quality and increase in the number of deaths. Whereas the number of deaths were also impacted by the poor Governance. There is transitive dependency so it can be observed as a joint impact of the two fields on Fear than that of their individual impact.
What factors affect Covid fear?
The better governance brought down the number of death cases.People were more feared when there were more Covid deaths around and vice versa. This can be observed in detail by going to the webpage and finding interactive version of it.
How fear towards COVID-19 has changed through time during this pandemic. The fear on COVID-19 has a strong correlation with how the respective government handled the situation and with the increase in the number of COVID-19 cases.
Italy in November and December 2020 had the worst fear on COVID-19 during the second wave where the total number of cases increased drastically and the nation went into restrictions based on zones with red zone being the most affected region indicates that people were concerned on contracting the virus and also felt that not happy with the way government handling the pandemic.
When there is more fear and dissatisfaction over the government policies Vs increasing cases the happiness wouldn’t exist . As a matter of fact, it signifies from the survey data about happiness in Italy at the end of 2020 as compared with the beginning of pandemic when people were less worried in the first wave than in the second.
On the other hand, countries like Finland, Netherlands, Norway did not have much impact in their happiness scale throughout the entire year which signifies that people thought that their government handled the situation better and there is an overall element of happiness in these countries.
How well or bad the Government is handling the issue of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) has a significant impact on the happiness index. In Italy, people are not inclined towards Government’s way of handling cases during the second wave. Among other countries, France is the country where people are not convinced with government policies during the entire cycle of pandemic.
The fear among the citizens can be reflected by the actions taken by the Government while handling the covid situation during the observed period.
People’s perception of happiness has shown a stronger resilience than we expected. It could be imagined that the happiness index would significantly decline in 2020 compared to before COVID-19. However, it did not significantly change and there were even countries where the happiness index increased. Additionally, looking at the monthly change of happiness index in 2020, it was not fluctuational as fear toward COVID-19, evaluation of governmental responses and number of new cases and deaths.
In general, fear toward COVID-19 is strongly correlated with trust in the government and the infection status. However, looking at monthly trends, fear correlates more strongly with trust in the governance than the infection status. Which implies that even though COVID-19 is prevalent, if people can feel their government responses well, fear can be quelled. What is important is not the threat itself but how to respond to the threat.
— — — — — — — — — — — — -End of the document — — — — — — — — — —
