In the capital's hip Punavuori district, restaurateur Richard McCormick is hanging plants and lights inside a row of protective glass cabins outside his restaurant Yes Yes Yes. "My friends don't really want to meet sometimes, which is understandable." The 36-year-old also admits that his social life is now more cautious. "My daily life actually hasn't been affected too much," healthcare assistant Gegi Aydin tells AFP, though his plans to switch careers to graphic design have been disrupted by a lack of job openings. ![]() The number of shoppers and diners on the streets of the capital Helsinki looks almost the same as pre-virus levels.įew people are wearing masks, although authorities have recently begun recommending them. "Social support might not be easily available, it's the other side of the coin of how we were able to adapt to the lockdown," Hankonen said. ![]() Nonetheless, the solitude of lockdown has exacerbated mental health issues which already affect one in five people in Finland, the highest rate in the OECD. "We like to be on our own and be a bit isolated." "In Finnish culture we are not that highly sociable," Hankonen said. "The economy is structured so that it's not necessary for a large proportion of the Finnish workforce to be in the workplace," Nelli Hankonen, associate professor of social psychology at Helsinki University, told AFP.īut the national character of the Finns, often characterised as reserved and outdoors-loving, may also have played a part. One reason is likely to be the relative ease of switching to distance working in the highly digitised society. Not only have Finns followed the rules, but European Parliament research last week found that 23 percent of respondents in the country said that lockdown had actually improved their lives, making Finland the most positive country in Europe towards the coronavirus restrictions. Like elsewhere in the Nordics, high levels of trust towards authority in Finland have meant that there has been little resistance to the government's measures. The "Corona Flash" application, downloaded 2.5 million times in a country of 5.5 million people, has escaped the privacy or functionality problems that have hit similar initiatives in countries from the UK to Norway. Since then, society has largely re-opened and an effective test and trace system was developed, revolving around a smartphone app. Officials credit the outcome to factors such as early government action, which included a two-month lockdown in March and a ban on travel in and out of the capital.
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