The Covid-19 pandemic is over in Norway, according to one of the doctors leading the response against coronavirus in the rich Scandinavian country.
Preben Aavitsland, chief physician in the infection control division at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, tweeted on Sunday a graph showing Norway with its lowest level of hospital admissions since the end of last summer and wrote: “That is the pandemic over with.”
He added to newspaper VG: “Here in Norway, the pandemic is so to say over. We can start to prepare ourselves for corona taking very little space in our everyday lives.”
“A fire chief would have said: the forest fire is out, and the danger for people and buildings is over, but there remains a little clearing up here and there, and we need to be vigilant,” he told state broadcaster NRK.
According to National Institute of Public Health chief physician Preben Aavitsland, even with the Delta strain becoming dominant, the number of hospitalisations and deaths will not exceed that of last summer. He ventured that the virus “will not disappear” as such, but will instead become a “minor threat”.