Covid has “finished” in Norway, says the head of health

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The Covid-19 pandemic is over in Norway, according to one of the doctors leading the coronavirus response in the rich Scandinavian country.

Preben Aavitsland, chief physician of the infection control division of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, he tweeted on Sunday, a graph showing Norway with the lowest level of hospital admissions since late last summer and wrote: “This is the pandemic over.”

He added in the newspaper VG: “Here in Norway, the pandemic is over. We can start preparing for the crown by taking up very little space in our daily lives. “

Norway has had one lower infection rates in Europe along the three waves of the pandemic, helped by the low population density and its relative isolation in northern Europe, as well as by the decisive actions of the government and health authorities each time infections began to increase.

Their cases and deaths have been significantly lower than in neighboring Sweden, but also in Denmark, which has taken a similar approach in Norway.

Aavitsland said that with very little hospitalized admissions due to Covid-19 and the number of people continuing to decline due to increased vaccinations, there would only be localized outbreaks in Norway in the future. Authorities were well equipped to deal with it, he said.

“A fire chief would have said: the forest fire has been extinguished and the danger to people and buildings is over, but there is a bit of cleaning left here and there, and we need to be vigilant,” he said on state broadcaster NRK.

Prime Minister Erna Solberg has credited the Norwegians’ overall confidence in the authorities to help Covid’s response, as well as its $ 1.3 million oil giant fund to ease its economic impact.

“What we did well is that, first of all, we moved hard at first,” he told the Financial Times last month.

Aavitsland said it would still take a few years to control the global pandemic and added that the Norwegian authorities would increasingly offer their experience outside their home country. “It’s not over until it’s over for everyone,” he added.

Not all Norwegian health officials agree with their view that the pandemic is over in Norway. Espen Nakstad, deputy director general of the Norwegian Directorate of Health, warned that the pandemic was not “completely over” in Norway and that people could not relax until all adults received their second vaccine in August or September. .

“Then, hopefully, we can live back to normalcy, even if the pandemic, of course, is not completely over in Norway until it is over in all countries,” he told NRK.



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