To curb the spread of the mutated virus, which was first identified in England, Norway is taking very drastic measures.
Among other things, Vinmonopolet, Norway's equivalent to Systembolaget, and schools will be closed until the end of January in the Oslo area.
Swedish doctor and researcher Jan Albert believes that Norway has good conditions for curbing the spread.
- They do not have a particularly large spread, so hopefully they have a good chance of slowing down the spread.
"New virus probably not more dangerous"
Jan Albert says that the current data does not indicate that the mutation would be more dangerous than the original virus.
- As I understand it, the new virus is not much worse from a disease point of view, but it is bad enough that there will be more cases.
How scared should we be in Sweden?
- This is getting huge attention from the Public Health Agency and the regions, to try to get stricter monitoring of this.
Just as in Norway, it is a matter of quickly scaling up the monitoring and then the measures to slow the spread of infection.
Can expect even more mutations
The European Infection Control Agency ECDC has now listed three new virus variants to be aware of: one from South Africa, one from England and most recently one from Brazil, and according to Jan Albert, we can expect even more.
- You can probably count on that.
That the more people who have had the infection and the further into the pandemic, the more variants we will see, and some will certainly be important for the spread and for the vaccine's effect.
It is great that we have a collaboration to monitor this.
But that the mutations would be more dangerous than the usual virus is, according to Albert, the least fear.
- That risk is the least of the three things you can worry about.
One is more spread, the other is how well previous immunity or medical immunity bites, those things are a bigger concern than more serious illness.