Iceland’s Maskless Success Against Covid-19

Mask-wearing isn’t a priority in Iceland, Elizabeth Kolbert writes for The New Yorker, profiling the country’s success against the virus: “We think they don’t add much and they can give a false sense of security,” Alma Möller, director of health in the country of just more than 352,000, tells Kolbert. “Also, masks work for some time, and then they get wet, and they don’t work anymore.”

But what has paid off—Reykjavík’s contact-tracing team “had almost no one left to track” when Kolbert visited to report the story—has been organization and planning ahead, early on, for the worst. The country responded with a contact-tracing and isolation program, and Icelandic Prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir cites early action, telling Kolbert: “We were following the news from China very closely … So we started our preparations long before the first case tested positive here in Iceland. And it was very clear from the beginning that this was something that should be led by experts—by scientific and medical experts. … I think one of the strengths of the process is that we just said, ‘Well, we don’t know what is going to happen next.’”