Why Denmark Is More Resilient Than Germany and the U.S. in the Covid Age
The vital ingredient appears to be the level of trust in a society. But once it’s gone, can you get it back?
Trusting their queen and country.
Photographer: Tobias Schwarz/AFP via Getty Images
One of the hottest topics in psychology has been resilience, the ability of an individual to cope with adversity and bounce back. The resilience of entire nations has been less studied, and mainly after terrorist attacks in places like the U.S. and Israel. Thanks to the pandemic, however, national resilience may now become the next big thing in social science.
In the present context, I don’t necessarily just mean a country’s ability to hold down infections or deaths. As the history of Covid-19 has already taught us, places that at one point seemed to be doing quite well, like Germany, are now having their worst outbreaks yet, and vice versa. Government policy and public-health interventions — lockdowns and the rest — matter. But to a large extent a virus just does its own thing, mutating here and then spreading there, sparing this city now only to hit it later, and so forth.