“The feeling of having seen all the James Bond”: cloistered in his parents since he tested positive, Viktor Andersson kills time by watching films like many other Scandinavians for whom the coronavirus is summed up for the to a tedious quarantine.
With a thousand cases observed, the Nordic countries are not immune to the epidemic that has dominated global news for weeks, confines entire populations, poses risks of economic recession and panics the financial markets.
By Tuesday, the disease had already killed more than 4,250 people out of some 117,000 known cases of infection around the world, China, Italy, South Korea, Iran and France being the most affected.
But in Northern Europe, no one has succumbed to date to the disease, which is described as more deadly than the seasonal flu, which kills hundreds of people in the region each year.
From Reykjavik to Helsinki, the vast majority of virus carriers, like Viktor, have a good eye. And they wait, under house arrest, to no longer be judged contagious before they can resume a normal life.
“I am not supposed to leave the house, except for walks in the neighborhood during which I must avoid approaching people”, testifies the young Swedish man of 22 years.
Confined to his parents’ home in Karlstad (south-west) until two successive tests declared him cured, this athletic hockey player probably contracted the virus at an airport during a trip with friends in Amsterdam.
“I watch a lot of movies. I feel like I’ve seen all of the James Bond movies. And I play a lot of cards with my parents. You have to find things to keep you busy,” he said.
No hospitalization in Iceland, very few in Norway
Of the 76 cases detected in Iceland, none required hospitalization. In Norway, only a handful of the 277 infected people were hospitalized.
It is, according to experts, especially the result of a set of demographic and health factors which make the good reputation of the Nordic countries.
“A generally healthy population vaccinated against diseases, a free health system, little smoking and industrial smoke …”, states Øystein Olsvik, professor of medical microbiology at the University of Tromsø (northern Norway).
“The Scandinavian population is generally less vulnerable to this form of disease which can develop in densely populated areas of China,” he said.
Still early stage
It is also a sign that the epidemic in the region is still in its infancy, often hitting a specific category of the population, those who travel.
The Scandinavians having tested positive at this stage are generally quite young (44 years on average in Norway) and in good health, contaminated during a ski holiday in Italy or Austria.
“If you compare with Italy for example, where a majority of the infected people are very old, (…) it shows that (the disease) is not dangerous for young healthy people but that it can be very serious for the elderly, “said Johan von Schreeb, professor of disaster medicine at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.
Besides, a Scandinavian old man is generally healthier than the average.
“When you are 80 years old in China, you are very old, while a Norwegian eighty-year-old can do Birken (a famous cross-country ski race) or go from Oslo to Trondheim by bicycle,” observes Professor Olsvik.
Drive-in tests
Tested or not, travelers returning from risk areas are invited to observe two weeks of quarantine at their home.
And health authorities are putting the package on screening to detect the disease at an early stage, even if it means inflating the statistics with many healthy carriers.
“These cases may be diagnosed only a day or two after the first symptoms, which are extremely mild,” says deputy director of health in Iceland, Kjartan Hreinn Njalsson. “So these people are very concerned about their health, are in close contact with their doctor and are given lots of advice on what to do.”
In Oslo, Stockholm, or Aarhus (Denmark), you can get tested from your car in a “drive-in”. Iceland is planning a national screening program to determine the exact extent of the virus.
But northern Europe knows it is not immune.
When, as is almost inevitable, the virus eventually spreads to all strata of the population, hospital capacities, especially intensive care units, are also at risk of being overwhelmed. And the human toll to become significantly more alarming.
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