It is probably the world’s most digital government, with just about every state service online.
But did that mean Estonia was better prepared than other nations to deal with the coronavirus?
On this week’s Tech Tent the Estonian President gives us her verdict on how an e-nation battled Covid-19.
The tiny Baltic state has just 1.3m citizens, and as Tech Tent has found on previous visits, just about every interaction with their government can take place on their ultrafast broadband connections.
So when the time came to impose restrictions on the movements of its citizens, Estonia was well prepared.
President Kersti Kaljulaid tells us that “e-school” was something her children and others were already accustomed to using to check the next day’s work assignments – “now there was also a Zoom link where you could go to school.”
Similarly, people were used to interacting with the whole healthcare system online.
“We added one button so people could start their own sick leave,” she explains. “Later, the doctor called back and verified symptoms and sent the person to testing, which means that there was no risk that sick people gathered in doctors’ offices and spread the virus.”
And it seemed to work – until it didn’t.
Throughout most of 2020, Estonia’s Covid-19 cases and deaths remained at very low levels, among the best in Europe. Then, as the winter arrived, they began to take off – and by February “we did go at one point to the top of the tables in Europe,” the president admits.
So what went wrong?
“People want to be together,” she explains. The virus spread most quickly among 20-24-year-olds.
“They have all the digital skills, many of them work in jobs which allow distant working, but you know, having a glass of wine on Zoom – this didn’t really work very well.”
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Estonia has the spring outbreak under control, and in the league table of Covid-19 deaths per 100,000 Estonia is below the UK and Germany. But it has a far higher death rate than Asian hi-tech countries such as South Korea and Taiwan.
One explanation may be that while Estonia’s government is, in theory, collecting vast amounts of the kind of data that would allow it to track its citizens and the progress of the virus precisely, it is also keen to guarantee their privacy.
“The Estonian government has promised its citizens that it is not looking into the data unless citizens give their permission,” President Kaljulaid says.
Meanwhile, South Korea used data from credit cards, CCTV and mobile phone masts to track people infected with the virus, and the Taiwanese police monitored phone locations to make sure people stayed in quarantine, and came knocking on their doors when their batteries went flat.
Such a level of surveillance would not be acceptable in Estonia, or in many other Western countries.
More evidence, then, that technology is not a silver bullet in the fight against the virus – much depends on the context in which it is used and the norms of human behaviour.
Young Estonians may be digitally savvy and well-informed about how the virus spreads, but they would still rather meet for a drink face-to-face than stare at a webcam in yet another Zoom encounter.