What is striking is that the Danes adhere to the rules remarkably neatly from the start. “Danes like to be on the safe side. If the maximum number of guests allowed at a wedding is 50, they prefer to cancel it or invite even fewer people.” Moreover, there is great social control and people point out the rules to each other. Discussions about the sense and nonsense of face masks are hardly conducted in Denmark.
“I don’t think Danes are more law-abiding, but they have more faith in the policy,” said epidemiologist Viggo Andreasen. This also means that the Danes speak to each other if they do not cough in the elbow or wear a mouth mask. Having everyone tested for free is very expensive. “But it is peanuts compared to a new lockdown, “said Andreasen.
Robots run day and night
The second leg of the testing policy lies with the Volks Vaccination Institute in Copenhagen. There are four container buildings, which are surprisingly the megalab in Denmark. “They were put on an unused lawn within a few weeks,” says lab head Arieh Cohen. Inside, there are mix-and-match robots from Switzerland that ensure that the Danish lab has an analysis capacity that is almost the same as that of all analysis labs in the Netherlands put together.
What happens in the containers keeps everything running in Denmark, Cohen says:
–
