Iceland now feels like the coronavirus never happened

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Iceland now feels like the coronavirus never happened
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Thanks to a rigorous regime of tracking and tracing, COVID-19 has more or less been eliminated in Iceland, giving the country confidence to reopen its borders on June 15.

Anyone visiting Iceland right now could be forgiven for thinking they've arrived in a parallel universe where the Coronavirus never happened. The bars and restaurants are full. People are out enjoying themselves. Spectacular geological attractions are wide open to tourists. Anyone visiting Iceland right now could be forgiven for thinking they've arrived in a parallel universe where the coronavirus never happened.

This can be an unsettling experience. It involves being ushered into a cubicle where two people dressed in full medical protective gear use long plastic sticks to prod much deeper than you might expect to take a sample. Ultimately, Iceland's screening and contact tracing system has been so efficient that it can boast one of the lowest virus death rates in the world: three per 100,000 people compared to 440 per 100,000 in the U.K.

That data is passed on to the health authorities who use it to trace anyone who might have come into contact with the virus.Kristin Yr Gunnarsdottir got to experience this first-hand when she was called up by the tracing team and told she had been served by a waiter with COVID-19 during a lunch she'd had six days earlier.

Attractions such as the Blue Lagoon geothermal spa have been closed since March, which has lost it the revenue from 2,500-3,000 paying visitors on average per day. While it is set to reopen this weekend, numbers will be restricted to reduce the risk of spreading the virus.

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