A risk perspective on common operational pictures: A case study of the Swedish Counties’ Coordination Office for the Covid-19 respons

The Covid-19 crisis has led to widespread impacts on society, not only in terms of high death tolls, but also in terms of cascading effects for essentially all societal sectors; especially due to all measures taken to reduce the spread of the disease. A range of actors have become involved in the response to the pandemic and to ensure appropriate actions being taken, these actors need good situational awareness, which can be facilitated by developing and distributing common operational pictures (COPs). This paper presents a case study of the COPs compiled by the Swedish Counties’ Coordination Office (SCCO). A point of departure for the paper is that for a COP to become useful, they should not only contain information about the present but also contain description about future potential states and uncertainties. Since this is a perspective that is addressed by the risk science, this paper addresses the question of how risk science can add value to the work with COPs in general and the SCCO’s COPs in particular. Our results indicate that SCCO’s COPs fulfil the expectations of the Government Office who are the main target organization. But there is room for improvements, where risk science can add value, if the aim is to improve their usefulness as decision basis.