Coronavirus DK: Milestone: Holding death at bay

Yesterday was the first day in two months when there were zero deaths from covid-19 (DK) registered. The disease statistics have been falling since around April 1. The number of patients hospitalized declined by ten in the past 24 hours, and the new cases of infection have been below 100 for the past five days. Here are the latest totals:

• Hospitalized: 137
• ICU patients: 32
• On respirators: 26
• Deaths: 537 (93 per million)
• Infected: 10,791
• Recovered:8,959
• Tested: 368,889 persons (400,000+ total)

The results indicate that Denmark’s strategy of beginning the relaxation of restrictions with young children (DK) was effective, says Virologist Allan Randrup Thomsen, Professor of Virology. The staff at schools and day-care centers succeeded in dividing children into groups and maintaining a distance between them. Thomsen cautions, however, that the number of fatalities is not the most important parameter because they can come after a long period of hospitalization. The number of new hospitalizations is more important, and that has also fallen steadily.

Intra-Nordic discrimination?

It’s a little curious that this announcement comes on the same day as a hypothetical complaint from Sweden (DK) about Denmark’s possibly opening its border with Germany but not the border with its closest Scandinavian neighbor. In the political debate on Thursday, some party leaders proposed opening the Danish borders to German and Norwegian tourists. This led Sweden’s Minister for Nordic Collaboration, Anna Halberg, to declare that such a move would be “unfair discrimination.” Halberg argues that one should not compare the spread of the infection in Copenhagen and Stockholm, where it is highest in Sweden, but rather the spread in Greater Copenhagen and the neighboring Skåne region in Sweden, where the spread is less extensive. 

Jakob Ellemann-Jensen of the Danish Liberal Party had said that Denmark should “not wait to open the border with Germany until it is defensible from a healthcare perspective to open the border with Sweden.” Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen reiterated that the government will wait until June 1 to open any of the borders. Italy, one of the countries hardest hit by covid-19, has just announced that it will allow foreign travel next month (DK).

The long, hard trek to herd immunity

Sweden has been following a more open policy on the pandemic than Denmark and the rest of the world. It has not ordered a strict lockdown and has not closed restaurants but has rather relied on the population to practice social distancing voluntarily. Its disease statistics are much higher than those in the rest of Scandinavia. There has been some uncertainty about whether its official policy is to pursue “herd immunity,” but in any case, the earlier admirers of its controversial laissez-faire approach from other countries have begun to change their minds about its advisability. It has registered 3,646 deaths (363 per million), almost four times as many per million as in Denmark and Germany and eight times as many as in Norway.

Not everyone agrees that such caution is necessary, however. Søren Riis Paludan, Professor of Virology and Immunology at Aarhus University, says it doesn’t matter whether tourists to Jutland come from Germany or Copenhagen, which also has a higher infection rate than Jutland. He does not even think that the wider spread of the disease in Sweden is significant. While the number of deaths in Denmark fell to zero yesterday, there were 117 new deaths and 625 new infections in Sweden.