160 - Iceland's Pandemic Strategy

Public Health On Call

The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

News, Health & Fitness, Medicine

4.6 • 644 Ratings

🗓️ 17 September 2020

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Iceland, an island nation of about 400,000 people, has seen fewer than 2,500 COVID-19 cases and only 10 deaths. Dr. Thorolfur Gudnason, Iceland's chief epidemiologist, talks with Dr. Josh Sharfstein about how the country's pandemic strategy meant they never had to close schools or restaurants, and how its research with genomic sequencing helped shed light on COVID-19 transmission and immunity. Gudnason also talks about the public's response, how the country's vital tourism industry has been affected, and his outlook on the next year.

KEYWORDS: contact tracing; antibodies; pandemic response

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Season 2 of Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins
0:11.6	Bloomberg School of Public Health.
0:13.6	I'm Joshua Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement,
0:18.8	and a former secretary of Maryland's Health Department.
0:21.8	Our goal is to bring scientific evidence and experience to the public health news of the day
0:27.3	through informative interviews with scientists, community leaders, policy experts, public health
0:32.7	officials, clinicians, and more. If you have ideas or questions for us to cover, please email us at
0:39.8	Public Health Question at jhhhu.edu. That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast
0:47.8	episodes. Today, I speak to Dr. Thoralfour Goodnessen, the chief epidemiologist in Iceland.
0:56.0	Iceland is an island nation of about 400,000 people that has seen fewer than 2,500 diagnosed coronavirus infections and just 10 deaths.
1:07.0	We speak about Iceland's strategy in the pandemic, as well as its fascinating research that has shed light on coronavirus transmission and immunity. Let's listen.
1:19.2	Dr. Goodnison, thank you so much for coming on the podcast to talk to us about Iceland. Could you take us back to the beginning of the pandemic? What did
1:29.8	Iceland do to protect the population? Well, I think first of all, we have been preparing for
1:38.9	a similar event like this for many years. We have been doing extensive preparedness planning with a lot of
1:48.0	stakeholders within Iceland. We have made up preparedness plans where we have sort of focused
1:53.9	on pandemic influenza. So I think we were quite well prepared in the beginning and we had involved a lot of institutions,
2:03.6	individuals, stakeholders and activities in Iceland before this epidemic hit Iceland.
2:09.6	I think that was the first part.
2:11.6	And then secondly, when the epidemic started here in Iceland, I think we had a sort of a focus plan on what we're going to do and how we're going to do it.
2:24.7	And we stuck to the plan and I think that has been successful.
2:30.1	What were the key elements of the plan?
2:32.6	I think the key element in the planning was from the beginning was that we would, because we were not seeing any medications,
	...

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