How an early lockdown helped Denmark flatten the curve

Fears in Copenhagen over the collapse of the welfare state and a breakdown in European authority led Denmark into an early lockdown, Vincent Wood reports, now the country is paving the way out

Odense, Denmark: the country has reopened schools after lockdown (AFP)

When Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen told citizens they would be going into lockdown, the only other country in Europe to have done so was Italy – a nation which had seen hundreds of coronavirus deaths and more than 12,000 infections. In Denmark, where no one had died, the number confirmed to have contracted the virus was closer to 500.

A month on and that response, which saw the government in Copenhagen break away from advice of European partners and even its own health officials, appears to have paid off. On Monday, Denmark lifted more lockdown restrictions and allowed beauty salons and hairdressers to reopen, having opened schools a week earlier.

“We are in uncharted territory,” she said in a televised press conference on 11 March, beamed to the homes of the country’s 5.6 million citizens, as she banned meetings of more than ten and shut down schools and businesses. “This will have huge consequences, but the alternative would be far worse. Under normal circumstances, a government would not present such far-reaching measures without having all the solutions ready for the many Danes concerned, but we are in an extraordinary situation.”

When Ms Frederisken made her speech, Denmark had identified 514 cases compared to the UK’s 456. In just over a month, Denmark suffered just 355 deaths and 7,711 cases, compared to the UK's 16,000 deaths and 120,000 cases. The UK did not enter lockdown until 23 March.

Meanwhile, the country’s transmission rate has fallen to less than one new infection per case. Hospitals are yet to be inundated or overrun, and are beginning to reopen to non-critical patients suffering other ailments. The infection curve has been flattened and the state, it seems, has held firm in the face of a virus that has seen powerful nations around the world struggle.

“I think it was the intention of our government that they would rather act early – and then if that was a mistake regret later – than act too late,” said Allan Randrup Thomsen, professor of virology at the University of Copenhagen. “It seems from the numbers of people admitted to hospitals that we have already come beyond the peak that we will get, at least in this wave ... I don’t like to brag but I think we have been quite efficient in containing the infection at this moment.”

The country is now among a small number that could guide the rest of the world on the most effective way to ease lockdown measures – but while the eyes of the world are on them, the trailblazing response of the Danish government has so far been guided by looking outside its own borders.

In the early days of the European outbreak that saw the continent become the virus’s global epicentre, Copenhagen’s first concern had been the early growth of cases in northern Italy that saw the number of infected people jump from single to double figures – implying fast community spread was not only possible but likely. If an epidemic had in fact been spotted on European soil, the potential for death and societal collapse represented a threat not just to the Danish people but to the fundamental idea of a state based on high taxation and an iron-clad social contract between the government and the public.

“The narrative of our welfare state is too strong to fail,” said Lars Igum Rasmussen, health editor at Danish broadsheet Politiken who has followed the government’s response throughout the pandemic. “So we couldn’t have a situation as in northern Italy, where the military had to remove body bags from Bergamo. That cannot happen in a welfare state because then the welfare state is not handling its responsibility.”

The second source of concern for the government came from Sweden’s Solna municipality, to the north of Stockholm – home not to any particular outbreak, but to the European Centres for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC).

In early March, a number of potential cases from the Austrian ski resort of Ischgl had alarmed medical officials in Iceland, who quickly raised the alarm to governments on the continent. However, the independent EU-founded organisation maintained its advice not to test those who came from the region as standard protocol. Cases in Denmark with origins in Austria quickly overtook those which had entered the country from Italy.

“The Danish government realised that you couldn’t rely on the information that we got from the European communities because that system is only as good as the information and the test results,” Mr Rasmussen said. “If you don’t test in a country, then you don’t have an epidemic on the table – even though in reality you do”.

In response the government moved quickly, in just over a week mass gatherings were banned, then business and schools shut, and finally borders closed – a measure that overruled their own health officials who had suggested it would be ineffective. By pushing through the cautious optimism of its own medical bodies who had assured the public everything was under control, the Danish government bought time to bolster hospitals and contain the spread of the virus as it tore through Europe. Now, after becoming one of the first to shut down, it is also among the first to lift its restrictions on daily life – starting with schools.

“This will probably be a bit like walking the tightrope,” the prime minister told reporters as she unveiled the measures. “If we stand still along the way we could fall and if we go too fast it can go wrong. Therefore, we must take one cautious step at a time.”

The plan is to allow children aged 11 or younger to return to school, thereby freeing up their parents to work from home and offer some support for the economy. Classes will, for the most part, be taught outside, and are unlikely to be as educational as they normally would – instead the measure is less about teaching, and more a matter of childcare.

“Our minister of education has clearly stated that parents should not expect teaching and education in the way we normally do,” said Dorte Lange, vice president of the Danish Union of Teachers. “It is more or less taking care of kids more than it is actually teaching.”

However while it offers respite for parents and begins the slow work of returning to daily life, some remain unconvinced. Parents have aired concerns that their children are being used in a state-sanctioned exercise in immunity, experts fear young children are too unreliable to bear the burden of relaunching society – and that the PM’s first step may see the nation fall from its tightrope.

“I’m afraid about the capacity of small children to follow the social rules that we have right now with hand washing and distance”, Professor Thomsen said. “It’s a pretty difficult group to control and I would, for that reason, rather have seen some of the older grades or some of the workforce returned to the streets because it was easier to tell them how to behave.”

He added: “We have to do this in different phases, but if the first phase goes wrong it will postpone the whole process.

“Everybody in the population, including myself, is waiting for some lifting of the restrictions and then if it turns out that we have to go back somehow because the spread picks up too much speed, then it would really be a setback. We don’t want to lose what we have accomplished over the last four weeks.”