What you are missing is the part about following directions. The literacy tests will instruct you to use the provided information to answer the questions. It doesn't matter if the information is incorrect. In fact, it may be beneficial to have incorrect information to eliminate people using preexisting knowledge vs comprehending the provided text.

I guess you’d fail the reading comprehension part then. All the required info is in the question. You can’t just pull 5% from nowhere. There is an assertion that it’s 9%, the task is to identify and repeat the asserted value, not make up your own.

"Reaches" ought to imply the lower threshold for softness. Of course, softness itself is not a crisp predicate.

I mean, not really; John's Hopkins puts Finland's all time test positivity per capita at ~26%, to the United States' ~30%. A bit better, but not enough to explain differences like this. Its not vaccination either: Finland only leads the US by ~0.23%.

One area where Finland had low impact is in deaths: 0.16% per capita to the US's 0.33%. But, if the theory is that COVID infections themselves caused a globally observable effect like this, that stat should cause the problem to hit Finland more, not less, given they had more COVID survivors than the US.

I think the better explanation might be COVID adjacent: COVID seems to have some direct neurological impact, but the lingering secondary cultural, economic, and psychological effects of the pandemic & lockdown feel a lot more likely to explain this. Additionally, I'd put money on social media also being higher on the sources list than direct COVID neurological impact.