ReviewBMJ global health2021
National health governance, science and the media: drivers of COVID-19 responses in Germany, Sweden and the UK in 2020.
Review in BMJ global health, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed, 39 citations in OpenAlex.
- Mapping risk communication practices in public health emergencies: a scoping review and comparison with Italian regional pandemic plans.BMC public health · 2026Article
- Epidemiological outcomes and policy implementation in the Nordic countries during the COVID-19 pandemic.Archives of public health = Archives belges de sante publique · 2025Article
- Capacity and crisis: examining the state-level policy response to COVID-19 in Tamil Nadu, India.Health policy and planning · 2025Article
- Decision-making under epistemic, strategic and institutional uncertainty during COVID-19: findings from a six-country empirical study.BMJ global health · 2025Article
- Health, human rights and freedom at stake? A critical discourse analysis of the Swedish media debate on the national COVID-19 pandemic strategy.International journal of qualitative studies on health and well-being · 2024Article
- Singapore's COVID-19 crisis decision-making through centralization, legitimacy, and agility: an empirical analysis.The Lancet regional health. Western Pacific · 2024Article
- Space and place for health and care - Nationalist discourses in Swedish daily press during the first year of COVID-19.Heliyon · 2024Article
- Governance and Public Health Decision-Making During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Scoping Review.Public health reviews · 2024Article
- 'What we lacked was the courage to take decisions that differed from the rest of the world': expert perspectives on the role of evidence in COVID-19 policymaking in Iraq.BMJ global health · 2023Article
- Personal protective equipment and medical students in times of COVID-19: experiences and perspectives from the final clerkship year.BMC medical education · 2023Article
- Patient characteristics and testing over COVID-19 waves 1 and 2 from the first German COVID-19 testing unit in Munich, Germany.BMC infectious diseases · 2023Observational
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- Political stringency, infection rates, and higher education students' adherence to government measures in the Nordic countries and the UK during the first wave of the COVID-19 outbreak.Preventive medicine · 2022Article
- The Approach to the COVID-19 Pandemic in Georgia-A Health Policy Analysis.International journal of public health · 2022Article
- The mechanism of governments' and individuals' influence on protective behaviours during the second wave of COVID-19: a multiple mediation model.European journal of psychotraumatology · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors at 4 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic is an unprecedented global crisis in which governments had to act in a situation of rapid change and substantial uncertainty. The governments of Germany, Sweden and the UK have taken different paths allowing learning for future pandemic preparedness. To help inform discussions on preparedness, inspired by resilience frameworks, this paper reviews governance structures, and the role of science and the media in the COVID-19 response of Germany, Sweden and the UK in 2020. We mapped legitimacy, interdependence, knowledge generation and the capacity to deal with uncertainty.Our analysis revealed stark differences which were linked to pre-existing governing structures, the traditional role of academia, experience of crisis management and the communication of uncertainty-all of which impacted on how much people trusted their government. Germany leveraged diversity and inclusiveness, a 'patchwork quilt', for which it was heavily criticised during the second wave. The Swedish approach avoided plurality and largely excluded academia, while in the UK's academia played an important role in knowledge generation and in forcing the government to review its strategies. However, the vivant debate left the public with confusing and rapidly changing public health messages. Uncertainty and the lack of evidence on how best to manage the COVID-19 pandemic-the main feature during the first wave-was only communicated explicitly in Germany. All country governments lost trust of their populations during the epidemic due to a mix of communication and transparency failures, and increased questioning of government legitimacy and technical capacity by the public.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.