5 THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT NORWAY’S TESTING PROGRAM

1 HOW MANY PEOPLE HAVE BEEN TESTED?

The country has tested 101,986 people for the virus, or 18,996 per million people, compared to little over 2,250 tests per million people in the U.K. That may be part of the reason Norway has been so successful in keeping the virus under control, with just 66 deaths recorded by Sunday. “We are one of the countries that has tested the highest percentage of our population and the assumption would be that the more you test, the more mild cases you will have among the confirmed cases, and more mild cases in the denominator will impact the estimation of the mortality,” said Didrik Vestrheim, senior consultant at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health.

2 HOW QUICKLY DID TESTING BEGIN?

When Norway confirmed its first case on Feb. 26, the Norwegian Institute of Public Health immediately began taking action to dramatically increase the number of tests it could carry out. “At the time we had the first case reported in Norway, testing was already available at labs in the major hospitals,” Vestrheim said.

3 HOW DOES MASS TESTING HELP?

“The more you test, the more people with mild symptoms you find, and you can also do contact tracing and quarantine around people with those mild cases,” Vestrheim said. Some 5,208 people have tested positive in Norway, meaning less than 5 per cent of those who have reported symptoms and been tested turned out to have the virus.

4 WHAT CHALLENGES HAS THE COUNTRY FACED?

“There have been shortages of analytics, for equipment to do the extraction before the PCR testing, for the swabs that you use to take the specimens,” Vestrheim said. “There’s also a huge shortage of protective equipment.”

5 OTHER FACTORS THAT HAVE HELPED?

Dag Berild, a medical doctor and associate professor at Oslo University Hospital, argued that the low level of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in Norwegian hospitals may also have played a role in the lower mortality rate. “Many of the influenza pneumonia cases are complicated by bacterial pneumonia, so if that is also the case with coronavirus, then patients in a country with a low resistance rate among bacteria would have a better prognosis than those in Italy, where they have an awful lot of resistant bacteria, particularly in Lombardy,” he said.