Denmark Breaks Daily COVID-19 Infection Records for Third Day in a Row

The record COVID-19 spike in Denmark has been accompanied by an unseen shortage of intensive care beds. Earlier this week, only a few dozen beds of this kind were reported as available anywhere in the country.

With 6,985 new cases of COVID-19 registered in Denmark on Thursday 9 December, the Nordic nation has set a new daily case record for the pandemic for the third day in a row, according to the State Serum Institute.

A total of 85 people were admitted to hospital on Thursday, putting extra strain on the country's hospitals. Earlier this week, TV2 reported that merely 10 available intensive care beds were left in the nation compared with 77 during the previous wave in February.

During the same period, the number of intensive care beds has been reduced from 400 to 310, according to a new report from the Regions' Clinical Quality Development Programme (RKKP).

“We're very worried. We have far fewer beds now than last winter, but at the same time we have many more patients”, Anders Perner, a professor and chief physician at Rigshospitalet Hospital and one of the authors of the study, told TV2.

Denmark is seeing an unprecedented spike despite having vaccinated nearly 77 percent of its population and being in the process of administering booster shots.

Furthermore, measures introduced by the government in late November, such as COVID passport requirements in bars and restaurants and mask mandates in stores and on public transport, seem to have been insufficient to slow infections, according to Eskild Petersen, professor in infectious diseases at Aarhus University’s Department of Clinical Medicine.

“When numbers keep increasing, that reflects that earlier restrictions aren’t really working. We should be seeing the effects now,” Petersen said. “Whether the new restrictions will work remains to be seen but the situation is critical if the trend carries on until Christmas when we spend more time together and hospital staffing is reduced,” he added.

Earlier this week, the government unveiled a plethora of further restrictions designed to quench the spread of COVID-19. These include remote learning for schools for the final few days of the term before the Christmas break, curtailed nightlife and no alcohol sales after midnight, and a broadened mask mandate.

Furthermore, having removed COVID's status as “society-critical disease” in September, Denmark has since reintroduced it, potentially paving the way for harsher measures such as lockdowns.

Overall, Denmark has seen a total of 529,000 COVID-19 cases, with nearly 3,000 deaths. Remarkably, fellow Nordic nations such as Finland and Norway are breaking infection records, too, despite having similarly high vaccination rates and re-introduced restrictions.