Why Denmark has lifted Covid-19 restrictions as cases soar

Denmark has downgraded the threat rating for Covid-19 from “socially critical disease” to “generally dangerous disease” and scrapped all coronavirus-related laws despite infections reaching record highs.

The Nordic country lifted restrictions yesterday on the grounds that the virus “no longer poses a threat to society” and “that it’s time to start thinking about Covid as endemic rather than a pandemic”, Bloomberg reported.

Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen told reporters that “the pandemic is still here but with what we know, we now dare to believe that we are through the critical phase”. The end of mandated restrictions was a key “milestone” in Denmark’s pandemic response, she added.

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‘No longer critical’

The restrictions in place in Denmark until the end of last month included “limited opening hours for restaurants and bars, use of Covid passports and the requirement of face masks in stores and at some indoor events”, Bloomberg reported.

Dr Camilla Holten-Moller, head of the Expert Group for Mathematical Modelling at the Danish Health Institute, said the rules were axed after the government decided “that Covid should no longer be considered critical to public health”.

Holten-Moller told UnHerd on Monday that with hospitalisation rates falling despite a rise in cases, “many of these interventions can no longer be supported by legal mandate”.

“We see these really high case numbers each day, but we don’t see it in the severity or in hospitals,” she said. “Patients are going to hospital – of course, a lot of people with Covid – but they’re not necessarily ill from Covid.”

According to Oxford University tracking, Denmark was reporting 7,480 cases per million people as of 1 February, compared with 1,120 in the UK. The Nordic country has a vaccination rate similar to that of the UK, however, with more than 81% of the population fully inoculated against Covid.

“World Health Organization experts have warned against complacency,” said Bloomberg. But Denmark is echoing “recent moves elsewhere”, including the UK, “to scale back restrictions amid signs that Omicron is less dangerous than earlier variants of the virus”.

The easing also comes amid a “sense that restrictions just aren’t able to stop the highly transmissible Omicron strain”, the news site added. “About one million Danes have been infected in the last two months”, but “hospitalisations in the country are declining”.

‘Life as normal’

“With Omicron, we simply don’t need anymore to flatten the curve as much as we used to,” Dr Holten-Moller told UnHerd. “I think with the Omicron, we’re in a good place – we expect the springtime and summertime will be pretty quiet.”

This optimism was echoed by Michael Bang Petersen, a professor of political science at Aarhus University, who is advising the Danish government on pandemic behaviour.

In a series of tweets, he admitted that the international reaction to Denmark’s plan had been one of “disbelief”.

But “a clear majority of the public supports removing all restrictions”, Bang Petersen wrote. Just 28% of more than 1,000 people surveyed in a recent poll for state-owned news channel TV2 said they were “concerned” about the shift.

“Should Denmark wait until all concerns have been settled? Maybe,” Bang Petersen continued. “But waiting is not free. It has costs in terms of the economy, well-being and democratic rights. Balancing these is an explicit part of the Danish strategy.”

The ending of restrictions did not mean that the health crisis was “over”, he added, but “if lockdowns are to be imposed again” then “societies will need as much trust & solidarity as they can muster”.

Health Minister Magnus Heunicke told CNN that the government had “promised the citizens of Denmark that we will only have restrictions if they are truly necessary and we'll lift them as soon as we can”.

“No one can know what will happen next December,” he warned, pointing to previous efforts to relax restrictions in Denmark. But “that’s what's happening right now”.

The return to “life as we knew it” will create a “shift of responsibility”, epidemiologist Lone Simonsen of the University of Roskilde told Paris-based news agency AFP. “With Omicron not being a severe disease for the vaccinated, we believe it is reasonable to lift restrictions.

“Two years into the pandemic, populations in most countries have reached high levels of immunity, from vaccines or natural illness.

“This is how it ends, judging from what we have seen with historical pandemics.”