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Yes, Iceland is a remote island in the North Atlantic, with only one international airport. And yes, it is home to less than half a million people.
Therefore, it would be fair to assume that it is fortunate enough to be able to become the first country in Europe to virtually get rid of COVID-19.
But tell the Icelanders and you won’t make many friends. Because when you take out the geography and look at the details, there is more; and these islanders are very proud of their success.
It’s Thursday night and young people flock to karaoke night in downtown Reykjavik, the capital, shouting performances of all the classics into the mic. They kiss and kiss, while droplets of saliva fly through the air.
Parties, restaurants, concerts and everything the rest of Europe craves are back here.
There are only 20 confirmed cases of the coronavirus so far. A person is treated in hospital and Iceland has had a total of 29 deaths, which is equivalent to 8.5 per 100,000 inhabitants.
“I have been preparing for this pandemic for 15 years,” Thorolfur Gudnason, Iceland’s chief epidemiologist, said to the BBC’s question on exactly how he had handled it.
Gudnason has been in charge of the Icelandic pandemic response from the start.
“We immediately decided what to do: run tests, trace contacts and isolate everyone diagnosed. We did it aggressively, from day one, ”he said.
Your contact tracing team, made up of real detectives, was in force before Iceland registered its first case.
When I pulled up to an ugly hotel in central Reykjavik, a tall, cheerful man removed the metal barricades, blocking the door: “Welcome to the hotel of isolation,” he chuckled.
Gylfi Thor Thorsteinsson quit a marketing job last March to open the hotel, where people diagnosed with the virus are sent. “On the first day, most of the hotel staff just left, they refused to participate,” he says.
Little by little he convinced them to come back and, over the last year, they have treated more patients than all Icelandic hospitals combined.
Every day, Thorsteinsson dons full personal protective equipment to get to their rooms and keep them company.
“It’s been a journey, never knowing what the day will bring us,” he says.
Today, the hotel has only a handful of patients.
But Iceland has been here before. It got its first wave under control quickly, and by May 2020 people had started declaring the country free from coronavirus.
Things continued like this for a while, but at the end of the summer Iceland was unexpectedly hit by another more ferocious wave, after two tourists who tested positive broke their isolation rules.
Thorsteinsson had already closed and gone home. He even had a big party for all his staff to celebrate.
“We honestly thought we won. But then I got the call: it was back. Within half an hour it had opened again and people kept coming and going. always do, ”he points out.
The difference now is that they come directly from the airport.
After eradicating the virus from society, Iceland erected steel borders. As of June of last year, all arriving passengers have been quarantined and testing is mandatory at the airport.
“Then,” a nurse yells before putting a tampon in my nose and throat, all before passport control.
Something some countries took almost a year to decipher, Iceland discovered within months. If the company had a chance to reopen, the virus had to be contained as soon as it entered.
When I asked Thorsteinsson what gave Iceland this advantage, he was adamant: “Scientists made the rules, not politicians. It matters. They know what they’re talking about, politicians don’t. don’t know. ”
At every step, Iceland has followed the science, led by Professor Gudnason and his team, without politicians participating in the daily briefings.
When I later met the Prime Minister of Iceland, Katrin Jakobsdottir, I was curious as to why she had taken a back seat.
The 44-year-old has led the country’s left-wing Green government since 2017.
For her, pandemic and politics are two words that do not go hand in hand.
She told me how excited she was about pushing for rigorous testing, tracking and isolating potential infections, in the hopes of avoiding drastic lockdowns in the country, which she said. she generally succeeded in doing.
But taking a back seat didn’t mean taking it easy: “This pandemic has kept me awake for a year. I just wish it was all over and I could talk politics again again, ”he points out.
Unexpected help was provided from the start. Reykjavik is home to one of the largest human genetics companies in the world, led by Kari Stefansson, a lively man in his sixties who rose to celebrity status in Iceland.
A few days after the virus arrived on the island, Stefansson agreed to hand his state-of-the-art laboratories over to scientists to track the spread.
“At first it looked like the extinction of humanity, so we went for it with a bang,” Stefansson told me as we toured the labs.
“We’re a small community. Everyone knew we could do it, so it was clear we had to do it.”
Since then, his teams have sequenced each positive case to understand how it spreads and evolves. He points out that since the virus mutates with every fourth transmission, 25% of the time, they can find out who passed it on to whom. “Did Juan pass it on to Pedro or Pedro to Juan?” He explains.
He has no doubts that it has helped Iceland stay ahead. “For me it was a fun time. I feel a little guilty to admit it, but it’s been thrilling, ”he says.
For months, Iceland managed to prevent the British variant from entering the country by containing the boxes at the border.
But while I was there, Kari Stefansson’s team noticed that the first case had leaked and infected someone else.
This person had gone to work in a hospital and then to a concert with 800 other people where she had socialized at the bar during the intermission.
It looked like a disaster. But here I have witnessed the power of Iceland’s powerful contact tracing system at work.
Within hours, everyone had been contacted and within days more than 1,000 people had been tested. Two other cases were identified and all infected were transferred to the isolation hotel.
Surprisingly, the variant was contained, unable to cause the chaos seen in other parts of Europe at this time.
“Normally, we are a fairly rebellious nation, but we thrive in a crisis,” Stefansson proudly emphasized.
Science aside, it’s impossible to ignore the role Iceland’s unique geography has played in its success. This volcanic island, with all its eruptions and avalanches, is used to dealing with disasters.
For weeks Iceland has experienced a series of thousands of earthquakes a day and it has become clear that the pandemic is just another disaster to be dealt with. The Prime Minister even admitted that she had the same teams working on both.
Gylfi Thor Thorsteinsson is in a good mood at the isolation hotel despite her new patients.
“We are in control,” I smile defiantly. “This is the spirit that we maintain. We are winning.”
But he’s not ready to celebrate: “No more covid farewell parties. Not yet.”
Kate Vandy contributed to this note.
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