Coronavirus in Denmark: Preparing for reopening

Today is the beginning of the Easter holidays, when families gather from across the country for parties and people travel to their summer houses. Yesterday, the two main officials in the government’s crisis management team gave brief interviews in which they urged people to stick to the program.

Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen (DK) said that is the next phase will be just as difficult as the past month. It is important that the reopening takes place in stages so that the authorities can follow the development of infections and cautiously so that  the country does not risk wasting the progress made in the lockdown. 

 Director General of the Danish Health Authority Søren Brostrøm (DK) was asked whether he could promise that the infections will not get out of control after schools and day-care centers reopen next week. He warned that they could if everyone does not continue to follow the government and Health Authority’s recommendations on social distancing, washing hands, etc. Reiterating the PM’s exhortation, he said that people must demonstrate over the Easter weekend that they can maintain their discipline because it is our collective responsibility to make the controlled reopening a success.

Not so fast

Meanwhile, there are several other developments as the country moves toward the next stage of the epidemic. 

Most of the country’s 20 largest municipalities report that they are not ready to reopen (DK) their schools fully on April 15. The schools and day-care centers need to make new arrangements in order keep the children at distance from one another, to clean the facilities more frequently than usual, and so on. Fourteen of them say if they reopen on the target date they will need to do it gradually because they cannot manage the usual number of children.

A few days ago, there was a report on the percentage of blood donors who were found to have coronavirus antibodies, and it was used to make an estimate of the actual number of infections above the official figures. Since then there has been a boom in blood donations (DK) because people want to find out whether they have been infected and developed immunity. Officials explain that, while testing for antibodies gives a rough indication of the spread of the virus in the general population, it is not intended to determine whether individuals have antibodies and the individual tests are not reliable. The first results from testing on Monday were presented yesterday. They showed that 22 of 1,487 tested positive for antibodies. That would correspond to 127,000 infected persons in the country, as opposed to the 5,386 confirmed cases.

New monitoring tool

I wrote a few days ago that a group of IT people had launched a volunteer initiative to develop a self-reporting tool to monitor people’s symptoms (DK). Yesterday, the Ministry of Health unveiled its own solution for the same purpose, Covidmeter. As many people as possible are urged to report once a week on their health status, their contacts and whether they have been tested. The information will give the authorities a better idea of whether the level of infections is being kept at a manageable level. You can access the reporting app with a secure logon at sundhed.dk (DK), and the information is anonymized.

Hospitals may not be able to care for all of their patients because of extra cases of Covid-19. General practitioners have offered to take on patients and complete their treatment if they need to leave the hospital early. According to an agreement between the Danish Medical Association (PLO) of Zealand  and the Zealand Region, they will charge double their normal fees (DK). This has been criticized for being greedy and unsympathetic by spokespersons of the parliamentary parties across the political spectrum. A PLO representative defended the agreement as fair because of the degree of responsibility entailed and added that GPs have seen their income decline about 40 percent during the crisis.

European solidarity

On April 1, Italy sent a request to Denmark for help in managing the Covid-19 outbreak. Yesterday, the administration announced that it would send Italy aid (DK) in the form of a number of respirators, an unstaffed field hospital and EUR 1 million to be used for protective equipment and ambulance operations.

(Note: During the coronavirus crisis, this blog has become daily digest of news from Denmark. Since the situation has stabilized, it will probably also take an Easter break for the next couple of days unless there is something urgent to report.)