![]() ![]() Kari Stefansson, the founder and CEO, was however known for his generosity but he, on behalf of deCODE had given the University Hospital the first Position Emission Tomography (PET/CT) in 2018 worth 800 million (Decode Genetics, 2017). It was, as well, the only company with the knowledge and equipment to step in and provide aid of this sort. This was done without any request from the Government and was estimated to cost the company 1,2 billion Icelandic Kronur (ISK) a month (Jonasson, 2020a). The private company, deCODE Genetics, offered its services for free to the Government of Iceland to screen, test and further gain an understanding of the virus. Additionally, the country had focused on the development of the tourism sector from 2010 to 2020, seen by many to be one of the key factors in reviving the economy. A decade later in 2020, Iceland had established more robust governance mechanisms in both public and private sectors. The country’s institutions had all been on a long road of rebuilding trust after the financial crisis of 2008–2010, which had caused a collapse of the banking system, currency, and economy, resulting in a period of political turmoil. The Government of Iceland and local authorities set about protecting the nation's health system through a series of actions. Several countries around the world had already closed their borders to stop the transmission of the disease (Directorate of Health, 2021a). And I think there is nothing else that matters here.On March 11, 2020, when the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 as a pandemic, the virus was in the early stages of spreading in Iceland. They started to test before the virus had arrived. “Basically, the authorities in Iceland prepared for it. “The entire world knew that there was an epidemic mounting in China in January,” he said. Stefánsson said an early, aggressive response to the Covid-19 outbreak is more important in limiting its spread than overall population or population density. ![]() “So this is all a question of the will, the desire, the determination, to do this properly and my guess is to do that, there needs to be some sort of a central control,” he said. ![]() has probably “5,000 times more resources” than Iceland. You could have the universities do the analysis of the data and help with planning how to deal with it.”ĭespite having far more people, Stefánsson suggested the U.S. “You could have the universities do the testing. “You have all of this talent, all of this equipment in your universities, that could simply be drafted to apply to this epidemic,” he said. is a vital weapon in the battle against Covid-19. Stefánsson said the strong academic system in the U.S. “By doing this, we seemed to have brought this epidemic under some sort of control,” he argued. Those who came into contact with an infected person are put in quarantine, he said. This involves putting everyone who tested positive in isolation and then determining all the people who have been in contact with people who have the disease, he explained. ![]() Stefánsson, a neurologist who was formerly a professor at Harvard University, said that in addition to an early commitment to widespread testing, Iceland’s government also deployed “an extraordinarily vigorous” system of contact tracing. In the U.S., where about 3.2 million people have been tested for the disease, there are more than 634,000 confirmed cases of Covid-19, per JHU data. Iceland has 1,727 confirmed cases of Covid-19 and eight deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University data. “If you were to bring this all to bare, you would easily be able to do the same thing as we.” “It ought to be even easier in a country of your size with your resources, with this incredible amount of talent you have,” Stefánsson said of the U.S. Census Bureau.īut Iceland’s ability to test around 10% of its population and deploy robust contact tracing when someone is diagnosed with Covid-19 should not be seen as something only small countries can do, Stefánsson argued in an interview with CNBC’s Meg Tirrell. has about 330 million people while Iceland has just about 347,000, according to the U.S. Stefánsson, whose Reykjavík-based company is known for its work analyzing the human genome, noted the obvious size differences between the U.S. Iceland’s strategy to track the spread of the coronavirus can be used in the U.S., deCODE Genetics CEO Kári Stefánsson told CNBC on Wednesday. ![]()
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