How Iceland Beat the Coronavirus | The New Yorker - Elizabeth Kolbert:
June 1, 2020 - "On the morning of Friday, February 28th, Ævar Pálmi Pálmason, a detective with the Reykjavík police department, was summoned by his boss. Iceland did not yet have a confirmed case of covid-19, but the country’s Department of Civil Protection and Emergency Management wanted to be prepared....'We were just talking' ... Pálmason recalled. 'And then, two hours later, we got the call.' A man who’d recently been skiing in the Dolomites had become the country’s first known coronavirus patient....
"Anyone who’d spent more than fifteen minutes near the man in the days before he’d experienced his first symptoms was considered potentially infected. ('Near' was defined as within a radius of two metres, or just over six feet.) [Pálmason's] team came up with a list of fifty-six names. By midnight, all fifty-six contacts had been located and ordered to quarantine themselves for fourteen days.
"The first case was followed by three more cases, then by six, and then by an onslaught. By mid-March, confirmed covid cases in Iceland were increasing at a rate of sixty, seventy, even a hundred a day. As a proportion of the country’s population, this was far faster than the rate at which cases in the United States were growing. The number of people the tracing team was tracking down, meanwhile, was rising even more quickly.... All were sent into quarantine.... If you were returning to Iceland from overseas, you also got a call: put yourself in quarantine. At the same time, the country was aggressively testing for the virus — on a per-capita basis, at the highest rate in the world.
"Iceland never imposed a lockdown. Only a few types of businesses — night clubs and hair salons, for example — were ever ordered closed. Hardly anyone in Reykjavík wears a mask. And yet, by mid-May, when I went to talk to Pálmason, the tracing team had almost no one left to track. During the previous week, in all of Iceland, only two new coronavirus cases had been confirmed. The country hadn’t just managed to flatten the curve; it had, it seemed, virtually eliminated it....
"Iceland, which has three hundred and sixty-five thousand residents — about half the population of Denver — is a famously tight-knit country. Almost everyone, quite literally, is related to everyone else, and if two people want to know how exactly their families are intertwined they can consult a genealogy database run by an Icelandic biotech firm called deCODE Genetics. Iceland was able to test so many people because, at the height of the outbreak, deCODE turned its state-of-the-art facilities over to screening for the virus.... Iceland’s university hospital was already testing people who had symptoms of covid-19. But by testing people who had no symptoms, or only very mild ones, deCODE picked up many cases that otherwise would have been missed. These cases, too, were referred to the tracing team. By May 17th, Iceland had tested 15.5 per cent of its population for the virus. In the U.S., the figure was 3.4 per cent.
"Meanwhile, deCODE was also sequencing the virus from every Icelander whose test had come back positive. As the virus is passed from person to person, it picks up random mutations. By analyzing these, geneticists can map the disease’s spread.... By sequencing the virus from every person infected, researchers at deCODE could also make inferences about how it had spread. 'One of the very interesting things is that, in all our data, there are only two examples where a child infected a parent,' [deCODE head Kári] Stefánsson told me. 'But there are lots of examples where parents infected children.'
"[W]hen I asked Stefánsson about the Icelandic government’s response to covid-19, he had only kind words. 'This was done in an extremely balanced way,' he said at one point. 'And I think the authorities did pretty much everything right.' At another point, he told me, 'The remarkable thing in this whole affair is that in Iceland it has been run entirely by the public-health authorities. They came up with the plan, and they just instituted it. And we were fortunate that our politicians managed to control themselves.'"
Read more: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/06/08/how-iceland-beat-the-coronavirus
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