Governmental Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic - A Quantitative Ethnographic Comparison of Public Health Authorities’ Communication in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden

The Scandinavian countries are often seen as a unity However, during the COVID-19 pandemic striking differences on how the countries approached the crisis became evident This quantitative-ethnographic (QE) study aimed to understand political and cultural similarities and differences between the three Scandinavian countries – Denmark, Norway and Sweden – through their crisis communications during the COVID-19 pandemic Specifically, we focused on how the health authorities of the three countries, in their press releases, treated information about COVID-19 and acted in four fields: reorganization of population behavior, containment of viral transmission, preparation of health systems, and management of socioeconomic impacts As a methodology, the QE tools nCoder and ENA were applied, respectively: to code the press releases and to correlate the treatment of information with the four fields of action © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG