Sunday - March 15, 2020

Norway Hit Too

With more than 1,000 coronavirus cases in southern Norway and 3 deaths in Oslo, northern Norway has closed the door on southern Norway. All public events and schools closed. Russia has closed the border.

[ Thursday 3/12/20 ] Kindergartens, schools and universities are being closed along with sport halls and public events. It is the new normality, the country’s health authorities say.

“These measures are the the most dramatic ever taken in Norway in peace time,” Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg said as she on Thursday presented a series of unprecedented regulations.

“It will give a different life situation for everyone in the country,” Solberg said in a press conference. She called for solidarity among citizens.

“We must stand together by keeping distance between each other,” she underlined.

All schools, kindergartens, colleges and universities are closed with immediate effect. In addition comes stringent regulations on peoples’ traveling. Anyone coming home from abroad will be forced into home quarantine.

At the same time, sport halls and all organized sport activities are being halted.

“This situation will take time,” the Norwegian Health Directorate says in a statement on the extraordinary measures that now are taken across the country.

The unprecedented regulations come as the number of coronavirus cases in Norway on Thursday increased to 621, an increase of more than 20 percent from Wednesday.

10 people in Tromsø have tested positive for coronavirus by Saturday, but northern Norway has fewer cases than most other regions of the country. 907 people have so far tested positive, making Norway one of the top ten most affected countries.

Norway was the fifth country after China, Italy, Denmark, and Ireland to announce a nation-wide lock-down to slow the coronavirus. By Sunday morning, three people, all in Oslo, have died of the virus.

The measures taken by the government on Thursday was by prime minister Erna Solberg said to be “the most far-reaching measures Norway’s population has ever experienced in peacetime.”

Additional to closing down kindergartens, schools, universities and asking all who have the possibility to work from home to do so, the borders are also closed for travelers from outside Finland and Sweden. 

From 8 am Monday morning, all Norwegian airports and harbors will close for incoming passengers from countries outside Finland and Sweden, except Norwegian residents returning home.

Tromsø is northwestern Norway, a narrow strip of land and small islands up on the coast. Norway is on the Atlantic side of the Scandinavian peninsula, with Sweden in the middle and Finland on the east side up against Russia’s Kola peninsula. Norway wraps up around the top, so it has a short border with Russia. Finland’s border with them is many times larger.

The Russian prime minister on Saturday morning announced a new set of measures aimed at halting the spread of the coronavirus in the country. Among those measures is a closure of the borders to Norway and Poland.

While there are about 2,000 cases across Scandinavia, Finland has only about a fifth as many as the other two countries. Northwestern Russia has less than a dozen, although Moscow is reporting 34 cases. 

Posted by Drew458     on 03/15/2020 at 08:56 AM   
Filed Under: • Pandemic Pandemonium •  
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