Social Anthropologist Klāvs Sedlenieks on the Current Situation in Latvia: There Is No Other Way Out

‘Many people in Latvia, including the political leadership, do not have sufficient understanding of what reliable knowledge means’, says Klāvs Sedlenieks, a social anthropologist and Associate Professor at Rīga Stradiņš University (RSU) when asked about the reasons for the failure to combat the pandemic in an interview, published on “LV Portāls”.

Sedlenieks is one of the members of an experts group that announced this month that they would cease to cooperate with the government’s efforts to limit the COVID-19 pandemic. They are criticising politicians’ actions as being insufficiently effective. We ask him how he sees the lockdown and what can be done to improve the situation.

The government has finally set strict epidemiological restrictions, which experts already recommended a long time ago. Do you think that the general public be willing to follow these restrictions?

It is clear that the efficacy of various restrictions depends on how carefully people comply with them. In that sense, the smart thing to do is to introduce restrictions that cannot be ignored. If schools are closed, then it is clear that no one will send their children there. Similarly, no one will go to stores if they are closed. I don't think anyone will keep a store open and risk a penalty. But such penalties can be seen as something positive, if we are talking about compliance with restrictions.

People have to work remotely as far as it is possible, and furthermore there is a curfew in place in Latvia. The concept of remote work will probably be interpreted in different ways with concessions made to specific circumstances and needs. If we talk about the curfew, I think most people do not leave their homes at the set times anyway. Consequently, this restriction is not so important to them. Of course, there will be people who will go out during the curfew, but this will be relatively easy to control.

The four-week-long lockdown will not change the overall situation, however, if people are not getting vaccinated. How might these restrictions affect people’s motivation to get vaccinated now and in the longer term?

That's a good question. It's hard to say.

I am convinced that the message that this is not a fight against the covid pandemic in general must be made really clear. The lockdown is simply a quick fix to keep society’s temperature down so that people don’t get nightmares. It does not solve the disease itself, but only removes the acute symptoms. The only way to end the disease is to get vaccinated.

If the public does not get vaccinated, there is a possibility that there will be another lockdown.

There are serious grounds to believe that the current restrictions on social interaction will reduce the incidence rate to a lower and more manageable level. But if the vaccination process does not prove to be sufficiently active, especially among the elderly, we will go back to square one after this lockdown ends. There will be no change. November will then become a great time for people to become infected from each other indoors.

The government is promising that the restrictions will still apply to unvaccinated people after this lockdown, after 15 November. Maybe it will convince some people to get vaccinated.

To be honest, I am convinced that a lot of people aged 70 and older are actually not against getting vaccinated. Therefore, we should be considering how to persuade this risk group to get vaccinated.

It is because of this part of the population that we are currently restricted to staying at home.

What could be the consequences of extending the lockdown in relation to the objectives that these restrictions seek to achieve?

I was talking about another lockdown in a hypothetical sense. It was already very difficult to get to this point, since it is clear that the economic and social consequences of sitting at home like this will be catastrophic. If these restrictions don’t work, I assume that COVID-19 will spread freely and that in a month's time we will no longer be surprised that people are not getting admitted to hospital. The time from the first dose of the vaccine to the second is about a month. This means that seniors must get vaccinated in the first week of lockdown in order for there not to be a large number of patients getting hospitalised after one month when the lockdown ends. 

However, we must take into account that this pandemic, just like others, cannot continue indefinitely. It is possible that at some point after 15 November, when this lockdown should come to an end, the incidence curve will naturally start to move downwards, as the number of people who could potentially become ill decreases. This will work for politicians, because we will not know whether it has happened because of the restrictions imposed by the government or because the spread of the virus has decreased naturally.

The government decided to apply the restrictions to vaccinated people too. A large proportion of whom got vaccinated precisely to avoid these limitations. How do you look at this decision? 

People are understandably bitter because they have been doing what they can to stop the pandemic. I will give an example. I can insulate my own apartment as much as I want, but if the whole house is not insulated, my efforts will amount to nothing. So, everything depends on collective action here. We are now in this situation because our society as a whole has not reached the required level of vaccination. I think that many vaccinated people understand that there is no other way out. It is impossible to improve the situation if social contacts are not reduced to the minimum in a sufficiently large part of the society, which would mean that restrictions also apply to people who are already vaccinated. Of course, it would have been fair to say this already at the beginning.

It was known in spring already, that even if 30% of young people get vaccinated, this won’t prevent the disaster. We knew that it is necessary to vaccinate the elderly almost completely, and at least 70% of the rest of society.

How can we motivate seniors to get vaccinated?

There are different ideas about this. I would like to see action to motivate seniors based on an understanding of where the roots of the problem are. But I feel that there is not enough knowledge about this to be able to take the right steps. 

However, there are some predictable problems. For example, a senior who has decided to go to a vaccination bus but isn’t able to stand in the queue for a long time so eventually give up and leave. This means that seniors must be given the opportunity to get vaccinated without standing in queues, basically facilitating their access to vaccination as much as possible. There must be a targeted approach. I guess, there are many seniors who have not received a call inviting them to get vaccinated. This has now become the responsibility of general practitioners, but does a doctor have enough time? They can only make such calls if there are no other urgent patients waiting. But GPs do not time like this, as far as I know. There must be some alternative mechanism in place that gives them time to make these calls or provide them with assistants who could make the calls on their behalf. And another question is whether people of retirement age will be able to get to their GP or to a vaccination centre right away.

All of this is quite problematic and pushes the question of how to convince and communicate with anti-vaxxers to the background. I think that many seniors are not against vaccination because of a principled stance, but because they think that vaccination is too risky because of their health problems, which is wrong, of course. Their own doctors might even have told them that. Unfortunately, as we know, there are cases when GPs themselves become a part of the problem, since their views on vaccination are not very reasonable.

And health concerns are not the only problem. People often assume that the way others act is a consequence of their moral positions and beliefs. Often these actions have nothing to do with morality, however, but simply with circumstances that are completely unrelated to the issue at hand. For example, like not being able to get to a vaccination centre and so on. 

How do you look at the government's intention to support vaccinated people of retirement age in the form of monthly payments of EUR 20?

It is clear that money is a great motivator. That’s the naked truth. However, when proposals like this were considered by the government previously, our group of experts was against it. Firstly, because giving money jeopardises the very idea that getting vaccinated is necessary for the recipients themselves, as well as for the common good of society as a whole. Second, there is a risk of luring people into this kind of market relationship - if we start paying for vaccinations, it will be hard to convince a part of the public that other socially necessary things might not also need to be paid for. Some seniors might also be offended by payments like this. Consequently, we could achieve the opposite effect, as it could be taken as an sign that the government thinks that all pensioners want is money. Furthermore, EUR 20 might not be the right amount of money for which a person is willing to "sell their soul".

The largest hospitals in Riga have information that the largest part of COVID-19 patients are Russian-speaking, once again raising the issue of how to reach this part of society. At the same time, it is often pointed out that Latvian society, including Russian-speaking citizens, is unlikely to lack information about COVID-19 and the possibilities to avoid the disease, including through vaccination. What is your opinion in relation to this?

This should be approached with care. One of the versions is that there are more Russian-speaking people in the older age groups in Riga. Thus, the fact that hospitals have a large number of patients who speak Russian is more likely because there are too many patients at risk in this specific group of people in general, rather than due to the fact that they have not been vaccinated or become ill because of their lifestyle. It would be wrong to conclude that all Latvian-speaking seniors have already been vaccinated. If we automatically assume that there is an issue with the flow of information, then we might be wasting money now. In order to be able to discuss this question in more depth, the situation needs to be understood in greater detail.

Of course, there are differences in how each of these parts of society receive information, as well as the extent to which they trust what government and state institutions say. It is clear that Russian-speaking citizens are in a more disadvantaged position in this respect – it is less likely that this information reaches them. Surveys show a clear tendency that Russian-speaking people in Latvia are against vaccination to a larger extent, that they are less active and less informed, but this difference is not disastrously large.

One of the growing trends that doctors are concerned about, seems to be aggression on social networks concerning vaccination and epidemiological restrictions, including anger towards science. How long could this last?

This will gradually decrease when life returns to normal. It is not strange that people become aggressive in times of crisis. The bigger the crisis, the greater the potential for aggression – authorities lose people’s loyalty, society gets frustrated, anxious, people don’t know how to act, they feel pressure and can't do certain things. This creates anger that has to be expressed in on or another way. It is a predictable reaction. We pointed this out last summer. It calmed down a bit, but now it's coming back.

How great is the concern about the long-term consequences of societal fragmentation?

Clearly it will leave some scars. How long will it take for brothers and sisters who are now on opposite sides to make up? Although the situation sometimes resembles a war, we can be glad that we are not experiencing anything similar to the events of 1918 or 1919 when people were sitting in trenches ready to act. Experience shows that eventually things get resolved and that people come to an acceptable level in their relationships. However, we don’t know how the events of 1919 affected the situation in 1940.

But for the most part when a crisis passes, everyone understands that it wasn’t worth it, as everything eventually resolved itself.

As this crisis shows, the capacity of science to understand diseases, to propose solutions and to quickly produce even several vaccines, does not have the effect logically expected if we are unable to prevent the impact of misinformation, the extent of which has proved astonishing. To what extent are the social sciences capable of understanding how society works and the factors that influence thinking and the dissemination of false information?

This is a very complex question. First of all, we have to look at what social sciences we are talking about. Basically, the aim of those social science fields that are evolving under the wing of technological giants, is to manipulate people’s actions. In the beginning they were mostly focused on marketing to make someone buy or click on something. Development has come a long way in this area – calculating how to get people to do one thing or another based on different fears, phobias, prejudices. However, the knowledge of how to combat them is less developed.

Secondly, it should be taken into account that some social sciences, I’m also speaking of own field here, come close to conspiracy theories. They draw up big theories without worrying too much whether they are well founded. Many theories based on classical Marxism come very close to the same beliefs that underlie these conspiracy theories. Basically, Marx's idea is that there is a class struggle where some people have power and others don’t. And those who have the power make others obey them using cunning methods. It's very similar to how people think about conspiracies now. The problem is that when it spreads too widely and everyone starts talking like that, the conspiracy theories can go very far, causing the public to lose faith in solid points of reference and rather build up beliefs in an evil elite. But we haven’t yet figured out how to combat this. Namely, how to make people look at the picture as whole, without getting lost in nightmarish conclusions and judgments.

It seems that there have been few studies in Latvia on the sociological aspects of the pandemic, although there may be funds for this through the European Union Pandemic Recovery Fund. What kind of research do we need now?

Research mechanisms are actually very slow. Everything starts with allocating approximate funding that is followed by a process during which ideas for research directions are put forward. After these steps there follows quite a long period of preparation, writing and evaluating the grant applications. Then the research comes in and, of course, it also takes time to publish the results. Overall it can take years. Nothing much can be done about it unless there is some up-front development that allows some things to be dealt with quicker or provide a channel to respond to certain topical issues faster. 

As to what is currently happening with COVID-19, a lot has already been researched. All that needs to be done is to collect the information that has already been gathered and used by other countries in their policies. Of course, epidemiologists and infectologists follow the latest information. They know very well what results one or another action can bring. People are doubting the necessity of various actions in regards to the pandemic on Twitter – wearing masks, curfews, hand washing and other things. The consequences of one or another activity have already been established in scientific publications and in the academic environment. Therefore, we can clearly predict that if we manage to reduce the number of social contacts, the disease will recede for a while. Things like this do not need to be investigated in more depth.

There are, however, issues that need to be clarified right away, especially at a policy level. One example is the issue of elderly Russian-speaking COVID-19 patients. It should be possible, with adequate resources, to immediately ask a task force to "go and find out, give an answer in a week!" But the problem is that these questions are not clearly formulated at policy level. For example, the question of what happens to the elderly is not formulated, and so we fumble and miss.

Why is this capacity and the corresponding policies not in place?

I find it hard to understand. Maybe politicians cannot even see that these issues arise. Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that many people in Latvia have no idea at all what it means to have reliable knowledge that allows them to judge the mood of society. They think that you can get it by going out and talking to your friends or by looking at what people are tweeting about. If the majority says they are against vaccines, then they may have an idea that allows them to draw conclusions: "Dear friends, everyone in Latvia is against vaccines!" But in reality, methods like this are completely useless for understanding public sentiment and action.

I assume that a lot of people, including politicians, have never come to the realisation that what they see and hear on the street might be subjective.

Part of this may be due to the general level of education in the country, which is also represented by the government. Education in schools is not very good. In universities, where we get bits and pieces of funding on a surplus basis, it is very poor. We are probably seeing the consequences of that now.

Source: lvportals.lv
Interview by: Guntars Laganovskis