CORONA PROJECT

I recently had an in-depth project where we compared two countries and looked at how they reacted when covid-19 arrived the countries. I chose to compare Sweden and France. It was really interesting to learn about them because they announced very different measures. The French government announced a complete lock-down of all public places and schools except for businesses that were “essential to the life of the nation” such as food shops and drugstores. Sweden on the other hand, only announced recommendations. There were also different people in charge in Sweden and France. The French government was in charge of the decisions made in France. In Sweden, the epidemiologist Anders Tegnell was the one in charge of all the recommendations. I believe this is important to keep in mind because it makes sense that governments have to be strict and introduce lockdowns considering the next election. In addition, experts are not as concerned around viruses since they found out a lot on little time. 

As a part of the project, we interviewed different people from the two countries to get a perspective of what people living in the countries thought about the announcements. I interviewed my grandfather in Sweden over facetime and sent a mail to a family-friend in France. My questions were based on what they thought generally about the virus, what they thought about the announcements from the governments and also their change in their daily life. It was really interesting to hear their perspective and thoughts. 

I made sure my presentation was based on both statistics and on personal experiences to the people I interviewed. This way I got various and interesting topics I could include. I also made sure my sources were reliable. I checked at least three pages and wrote down what all of them had in common. That way, the statements I wrote down were most likely reliable. 

Since this was an oral presentation, I made sure my language was formal, but not too formal. It was fun working on the language and I really enjoy writing in English. It was challenging to changing the language of the answeres I got from the two interviews to be more formal, but I think it worked out in the end. 

I struggled a bit with structuring the presentation since it was a lot I wanted to include. After a lot of time thinking about it, I concluded with listening to the quote “less is more”. I wanted to focus on the interviews and statistics and talk more about that, so the structure would be clearer. 

I am very happy with the results and as I look back at the work I put down now into this project, I think it was worth it. I also learned a lot. The most important message I learned is that we cannot judge how the countries have reacted so early on. We still don’t know a lot and based on the death numbers in both of the countries I compared, we don’t know which of the countries reacted in the best way. 

       

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Corona virus