Diaries From A Socially Distanced North
COMMUNITY
Writers: Vilborg Einarsdottir, Ajaana Olsvig Kristjansdottir, Helge M. Markusson, Christina Rein Seehusen, Daniel Bookham, Martin Stepek
Photographs: Helge M. Markusson, Daniel Bookham, Kateryna McKinnon, Christina Rein Seehusen, Martin Stepek, Kuno Fencker, Valgeir Magnusson, Ólavur Winther Jákupsson
April 2020
We are all affected. All doing our utmost to stay safe, for ourselves and for those around us. Many, most - or maybe all of us who live in the High North are also likely to be thankful for belonging to our part of the planet. Where vast distances and low population density works to help steer us out of harm’s way. But those same facts also mean that infected or deceased are more likely names than statistical numbers to us.
Over two weeks around Easter, we at the editorial office in Reykjavik were in contact with many of the people often referred to as The JONAA Family; journalist, writers, advisors, photographers, board members and others on the team. People who are based throughout our JONAA defined region of the high North Atlantic Ocean and the Arctic. Many living in communities both small and remote by any international standards, but all living lives defined by COVID-19.
The Diaries from a Socially Distanced North are the outcome of these conversations.
More than enough space in this part of the world to move freely
- Helge M. Markusson in Tromsø
It is a strange time for most people, also in my part of the world. Most of us stay at home, while those who are needed keep the wheels running in their workplace.
Regarding me, an office at home has been established, which works very well. In other words: I am a fortunate son living in a well-driven Country.
But these strange days also mean a lonely existence for many. In Tromsø, as in Norway otherwise, most places where people usually gather people are in shut down: bars and taverns, swimming pools, and fitness centers.
Fortunately, we have enough space in this part of the world to move freely. And here's my point: it is plenty of snow. This winter, it seems that we have all the snow in the world. While the spring has arrived in our Capitol, Oslo, we still struggle with winter storms on nearly 70 degrees north. In the last weeks, over 140 cm of snow has been measured in Tromsø, and it continues to fall. For those who like snow, this is good news.
Tromsø has its center on the 11-kilometer long island of Tromsøya. Only on this island, there is a trail network for cross-country skiing of over 40 kilometers. If I make the trip to the mainland or the neighboring island of Kvaløya, the opportunity is almost endless. In the municipal of Tromsø, it exists 400 kilometers of prepared ski trails.
The municipality continues to maintain these trails, and the intention is to allow people still the opportunity to get outside their homes. It provides clear health benefits in terms of both physical and mental health.
So, we get out, and we enjoy our ride! A long-awaited variation in-home office insulation. In that sense, we suffer no distress.
Helge M. Markusson, outreach coordinator at the Fram Center in Tromsø, North Norway.
Cross country skiing on the many kilometres of trail around the city of Tromsö, North Norway. JONAA©Helge M. Markusson
There was fear towards us on returning
Valgeir Magnússon is one of those people suspected of having more hours in his day than the rest of us. But when JONAA got hold of him in the week before Easter life was a lot calmer than normally. Staying on the small island of Hrísey in north Iceland, where he and his wife have kept a second home for over a decade.
“Life here is always quiet. That is why we love this place and come so often to work or just relax for days or weeks at a time. But it is exceptionally quiet now. There is no one around. You look out of the window and everything is covered with thick unbroken snow. Even the steps to the church have not been cleared, but then again why clear them? There is no one attending mass this Easter Sunday,” says Valgeir.
“We are working in the house the four of us; my wife, my daughter, son-in-law and me, each in his or her own little space, sharing the kitchen and sleeping on the lower floor. A bit of a commune feeling in the air, which is really nice.”
“Actually I was in Hrísey with my wife when early news of the virus began to circulate in the media, but life on the island was just as normal and corona not the subject of conversation. It was something happening far away, to foreign people. Then we returned to Reykjavík and found ourselves in a very different world. The virus had landed in Iceland, very little was known about it yet, people were afraid and every conversation began or ended with corona,” says Valgeir.
“So we finished what we had to do workwise in Reykjavik and then quickly packed our bags and headed north again,” says Valgeir. “What struck me on returning, was that in these two weeks that we were away, everyone in Hrísey had become aware of corona and people were scared. Understandably, as this is a small community and the average age is fairly high. Some islanders had returned from trips to affected countries and gone directly into quarantine, but we were just coming back from Reykjavík with no quarantine obligations and I could feel a certain fear towards us on returning. That felt strange. Understandable but strange.”
Valgeir wearing the only message that matters these days: Keep calm & Wash hands.
Valgeir is the working chairman of advertisement agency Pipar/TBWA with close to 50 employees. “What we did right away in order to protect our people and the business was to split the company into two groups, that have not physically met since February. We offered everyone the choice of working at the office on designated days for their group or working from home or elsewhere and many have done that partly or for the whole time.
By designating days for each group we also stayed within the required limits of 20 people coming together at the office with everyone having good space to respect the 2 metre rule. It works well and normally there are no more than 10 people at the office at the same time.
Only a few at Pipar are used to largely working and meeting online with colleagues and with clients, so for that group there was no learning or training required. All other employees had to quickly adapt to a new way of working and suddenly there was the need for everyone to be able to enter our joint database from home at all times. Especially the designers who work with heavy documents.
It has all worked out fine, but continuous online work makes it harder to keep up the dynamics of creative meetings. With all the different businesses that corona has swifted from office to online, this is something that people should to be aware of and managers be prepared to react to. Especially when we are living in times where employees or their close ones can be affected or sick and people have to deal with personal worries, work from crowded homes, stay safe and still keep up the spirit and appearances.
I felt the shadow of such hardness come over our people both when news with these first high numbers of infections and deaths from Italy were reported and then again with the news of the first corona death in Iceland.
There is very little to do except take care of yourself, take care of your people and do your best for your close circle and community - which pretty much means acting as if you have the virus. That way you protect yourself and more importantly you protect the people around you. Nothing is quite normal and no one has a clear view on the future right now," says Valgeir and adds, "except we know that corona will not change the calendar. Christmas for instance will be in its place and we are very much working on Christmas campaigns right now. But it is clear that we will all be adapting to a new world and a new way of doing business, for the old one is not coming back in the same way as it was,” says Valgeir Magnusson in Iceland.
Hrísey. Unbroken snow and everything very quiet. JONAA©Valgeir Magnusson
No Easter mass - no need to clear the church steps. JONAA©Valgeir Magnusson
On this island of no cars, most people have their tractors. JONAA©Valgeir Magnusson
Corona exposes our vulnerability - we need to learn from that
In some places restrictions have been greater than in others. Greenland for example was completely shut down on March 18th, both to the outside world and within, placing towns and settlements in isolation, as is explained in a story insert at the end of this article. And they did more, like deciding with no prior notification to temporarily ban all sales of alcohol in the capital Nuuk with prime minister Kim Kielsen’s explanation: Drunk people are less likely to follow restrictions like social distancing and more likely to come together in groups than sober people.”
These measures seem to have worked in Greenland’s favour, as of now on April 19th the total 11 cases of COVID-19 that have been found in Greenland have all recovered, no one has died and no new cases have been found.
Kuno Fencker and Aki-Mathilda Hoegh-Dam on the much appreciated balcony of their home in Nuuk, Greenland.
Kuno Fencker, former chairman of Royal Arctic Line, lives in Nuuk where he studies law at the University and shares a home with his partner, parliamentarian Aki-Mathilda Hoegh-Dam, one of the two politicians holding Greenland’s seats in the Danish Parliament.
“Aki was in Greenland when it became clear that the country would be closed and we had to make a quick decision if she would take the last flight out to Copenhagen or stay at home during the lockdown, which she did. So these days we are both working from home, which for me is somewhat less different to life before corona than it is for her. Personally the situation has brought about a rather positive change for me so far. I am doing my studies at home with my partner working across the room instead of across the ocean.”
Kuno was one of the first people to take to social media in Greenland in the early days of COVID-19 news coming out of China, calling on authorities to take strict measures like a lockdown, limiting chances of people coming together in groups and closing sport facilities and schools.
“Authorities here were a bit late in reacting in the beginning of all this. It was not really until we started seeing the high numbers from Italy and countries like Denmark closed their borders, that reality was faced and some real reaction happened.
By then I had already taken my two daughters out of school, which some people saw as me being paranoid at the time when parents were still planning birthday parties at the swimming pool. But eventually schools were closed and the University a little later after a person there had been infected. Slowly the seriousness of all this crept in.
All commercial flights were grounded and the flight ban automatically placed all these small communities in Greenland in isolation, which was important to do. We have many small settlements all along our coastline, often with ageing populations and limited or even no health care facilities. So it is important to limit people’s movements to their communities. People can still sail from a place as long as they return to the same port with no other stops, so fishermen and hunters can still do their jobs.
Then came the temporary ban on alcohol sales here in Nuuk, which I must admit was a very good decision to make. It also underlined the importance of social distancing, even for us who have all this space. Luckily we have not seen many people infected here and so far no one has died. But corona has been a harsh reminder for our small nation in this big country on just how vulnerable we are to global threats like this virus. It has shown us that there is an immense amount of work needed to do and develop, especially in our health care system, if we are to be able to independently fight and respond to something like this in the future,” says Kuno Fencker in Greenland.
Grateful to friends for helping me attend my father’s funeral
- even if only on Facebook live
Another Greenlander who has greatly felt the isolation and far distance from home, is journalist Inga Hansen. Inga, previously a reporter of nearly 30 years for KNR, Greenland’s State broadcasting company decided three years ago to further her studies and do a Masters degree in Indigenous journalism at the University of Kautokeino in Sami North Norway. When COVID-19 with all its restrictions arrived in Norway, Inga decided to make the most of it, stay put and work on her final thesis.
“All my life I have travelled extensively, often to the remotest of places and often on the shortest of notice. Around the time Greenland was being closed down us Greenlanders studying abroad were contacted by authorities and offered assistance to get back home while it was still possible,” says Inga.
But having only a few months earlier been hospitalized in Norway and treated for serious illness, she made the decision not to go.”
“It was not the travel as such or the situation home in Greenland that I was afraid of, it was the airports. The crowds and the closeness of people."
“In terms of safety it was a good decision. If there is ever a place on the planet where it is easy to self-isolate and be fine with it, it is here in beautiful Kautokeino. There is so much space, so few people and such good and quiet life,” says Inga. She lives in a student house, which she shares with two others, “whom I have not met in person since this began. But I hear movement from their parts of the house, so I know I am not all alone.”
But for personal reasons, the decision to stay became a hard one and Inga went through a tragic time of feeling very alone and very remote. Without little prior warning, her father, Elias Hansen a shop-keeper in Qaqortoq, Inga’s home town in South Greenland passed away after only days of illness.
With everything closed for travel, Inga had no way of attending the funeral, but a good friend streamed the ceremony for her on Facebook live. “It was a beautiful thing to do and I was deeply touched by having the chance of being there, even if it was only in a digital way. Hearing the things that were said at the moment they were said,” says Inga.
“When you travel as much as I do, you know in your heart that chances are that one day someone close to you will pass away and you may not be there to hold their hand and say in person all the things we want to say to the people we love before they die. But you never really expect not to be able to attend their funeral; you always expect that you could drop whatever you are doing and head back home to show your respects,” says Inga Hansen in Norway.
Safe social distancing on a beach in Bornholm. JONAA©Christina Rein Seehusen
Hunger for cuddles and hygge - we have a word for that: Hudsult
- Christina Rein Seehusen on corona life in Bornholm
I live on the Danish island Bornholm in the middle of the Baltic Sea. There is always a natural feeling of isolation here – but these days it is wildly magnified: People are arguing whether we should welcome tourists or not – although everyone, including the tourists, are keeping the distance as prescribed, washing hands etc. and the global pandemic is already here.
And with it comes loneliness.
The unmet need for a hug, touch or even just sitting next to someone in a sofa … There’s a word for it in Danish: “hudsult” – meaning “skin-hunger”. We hunger for cuddles, cosiness, hygge! Especially those of us living alone.
People stuck in isolation with families though might hunger most of all for a minute in solitude! Ever so often do I meet (at a distance of course) a parent walking alone in the woods taking enormous breaths of relief.
For me, the frustration of this skin-hunger transfers into explosive amounts of energy, which I put into housework mainly: After coming home from a hard day’s work digging in the field (I work as an archaeologist) I would normally be exhausted and just cook dinner and then rest.
These days though, I hardly cook at all. I just eat müsli - because I’d rather spend time cleaning the gutters - an excavation in it’s own right - scrubbing my cellar walls, floor and ceiling, mending cracks, cleaning out cupboards, and putting old stuff up for recycling. And in this I am NOT alone!
Everywhere you look, people are queuing up at the recycling site, selling stuff on-line, gardening the gardens, fiddling with needle- work and puzzles. It seems this isolation, in which we are all together, has fuelled a new kind of productivity and community – which I hope will stay on, even when the pandemic has gone away.
Christina Rein Seehusen.
The home in Bornholm, where the archaeologist finds herself “excavating” in a new way in corona times. JONAA©Christina Rein Seehusen
In our small community infections or deaths can never be statistics or numbers - they are names we know
JONAA got hold of Jákup Sørensen, while spending Easter with his wife and three children at their summerhouse in Húsavík on the island Sandoy. Life is quiet there, just like in Thorshavn where they live and Jákup works as a senior advisor at NORA, The North Atlantic Cooperation, an organization of the Nordic Council of Ministers.
“Life in the Faroes has been in the slow lane very much from the beginning of this corona time. Changes in the society that had to be made have all happened very effortlessly,” says Jákup.
“Perhaps because we are a fishing nation, living in a remote part of the world that is ruled by the forces of nature and weather on any given day. We are used to being put on “lockdown” by a storm, rough seas or other causes that we have no control over. When the British were here in WW2 they called us “the Nation of Maybe” because every answer they got on the possibility of doing things around the islands, began with the word: Kanska, - Maybe. That says it all.”
Jákup Sørensen in Sandoy, Húsavík in the background. JONAA©Ólavur Winther Jákupsson
The Faroe Islands have been covered in the international press as one of the countries that has been the most successful in the fight against COVID-19. Around 10% of the population of roughly 60 thousand people has been tested and Faroese doctors have been able to track and quarantine those who had contact with the 185 people found infected so far. Of these, 176 have recovered according to corona.fo, the official website on the pandemic. And so far, no one has died of COVID-19 in the Faroe Islands.
“We hope that situation continues,” says Jákup. “Authorities have not brought forth strong regulations or bans, it has been more in the form of recommendations on what they wish for people to do. And the Faroese people very much comply with those wishes. Shops are generally closed except those essential with food and medicine, there are no crowds gathering for any reasons, we all do a lot of handwashing and santizising, we meet with the two metres between and we hope that by taking all these measures we will avoid seeing corona deaths in our country.”
“I sense a strong feeling of solidarity within the nation to get through this, which I think has a lot to do with the fact that we are so few. We have seen the horrific death statistics from abroad, but when you belong to a small community like here, infections or deaths do not become numbers or statistics. They have names and in most cases these are names we know or are somehow connected to. They are someone’s grandmother, sister, brother and so forth. They are your neighbour or someone you went to school with. This even extends to our nearest neighbouring country. There have been 9 deaths in Iceland as of now and one of them is a name I know, We are all aware of this and such extreme closeness that happens in a small nation reminds us every day to do our best in this fight to stay safe and keep the Faroes healthy,” says Jákup Sørensen in the Faroe Islands.
Snapshots of life in corona times. JONAA©Martin Stepek
Maybe, ultimately something wonderful can come out of all this
- Martin Stepek in Scotland
As a practitioner and teacher of mindfulness the impositions and emotional consequences of coronavirus have had comparatively little effect on me.
I have been doing Zoom or Skype chats for years and more recently, in the past two years or so, have been delivering mindfulness programmes by webinar. So in terms of work, this is nothing new, apart from the rather welcome lack of travel to live events that I deliver.
This of course has led to a reduction in my income, but of course almost all the shops are closed so we’re spending so much less now, so it hasn’t had the same impact as normal.
Home life is fine. My wife and I live together, so we have no change there. Our daughter lives in nearby Glasgow so we can’t see her any more, but we catch up daily, as we now do with our son Iain who works in Nagoya, Japan. We play online games together, share news, and so on. It’s all good.
I have given a great deal of thought – and written two articles – about “After Coronavirus”, with a particular view on how we can use this enforced shutdown to reboot the economy in a consciously Green direction, thus accelerating the change to carbon-neutral years if not decades ahead of the previous dismal trajectory it was on. This will of course require global agreement but I think people may well demand it now if we combine forces.
So maybe ultimately something wonderful can come out of all this and be a fitting testimony to those who have lost their lives, and to all those who have risked their lives to save others.
Catia Andreia de Brito in a safe socially distanced environment.
Woke up in a foreign country with closed borders
Catia Andreia de Brito from Iceland, landed in Copenhagen on a Wednesday and woke up in a country with closed borders on the Thursday. “The plan was to stay a few days in Denmark, visit friends and have a short and sweet winter break,” says Catia who is an employee relations manager at a hotel in one of Iceland’s large chains.
“Those plans changed quickly and the Denmark days became a crash course in crisis management and never ending online meetings with the management team of the hotel. This was before authorities in Iceland came up with their “rescue package” and so early in the process that we simply didn’t know what would happen. How this would affect the tourist industry long term, if we were looking at an empty hotel for weeks or months and worst of all, if we would have to lay off a few hundred people. That became a more and more likely decision for a while and that was the subject most difficult to face.
Then all kinds of news were coming in from all kinds of places and changing the settings for every plan from one hour to the next. What we thought was going to happen in the morning had taken three changing turns by midday and so on.
So whatever strangeness I felt that first morning in Denmark quickly vanished and all attention and energy went into working online with my collegues on how to react to this new reality. Which of course was still very unclear.
At some point I decided to take a break, clear my head and go for a walk down Strøget. The central pedestrian street in Copenhagen, which on any given day is crowded with sightseeing tourists and shoppers - but this time I had the street more or less to myself. That was another reality check.
Luckily I got a flight back home and landed in Iceland literally hours before it became mandatory to enter into 14-day quarantee on any arrival from abroad. But best of all, I arrived to the news that Icelandic authorities had introduced their plans for a rescue package, amongst other things giving companies the option of keeping employees in limited positions, down to 25% work and the state paying unemployment benefits for the remaining 75%.
To come home to these news felt like the best thing ever,” says Catia. “Most of our staff works on these terms now. Of course there are limits to the work that can be done in a hotel with no guests, but with our people working 25%, we can keep the numbers on each shift to the required minimum of 20 people, the 2 meter social distancing is easy and all sorts of smaller tasks, repairs, renovations, deep-cleaning and so forth are happening.
More importantly for me, - because so many of our staff are foreigners who may have lived for years in Iceland, but still have their families in other countries - this solution means that people get out, even if it is only for 2 shifts per week. They come to work, meet the others, share their thoughts, feelings, grief and worries. People are in communication and more aware of everything that is going on here than if they had to stay at home throughout every day with most of their loved ones far away,” says Catia Andreia de Brito, in Iceland.
Our reputation in Maine as a safe and remote place is also exposing some long existing fault lines, as summer residents, second home owners looking to leave big cities and infection hot spots are running into concern and fear from the communities they see as part time homes. JONAA©Daniel Bookham
Both natural and built environment help in this fight
- Daniel Bookham in Rockland, Maine
From the perspective of us up here in the far north eastern corner of the United States, the arrival and spread of coronavirus and Covid19 has been like watching a seemingly distant and slow moving tornado gathering speed and ferocity as it has swept from west to east, veering off to hit cities like San Francisco, Seattle, New Orleans, Detroit, and New York as it carves it's erratic path.
As is the case everywhere, the virus is here in Maine and has sickened hundreds and at the time of writing claimed 12 lives. Even in towns and villages yet to see a case Mainers are advised to act as if it is in their community (which it surely is) and to act as if they are infected, taking precautions to protect others accordingly.
With it's two week incubation period and the potential for asymptomatic transmission my friend Dr. Norm Dinerman, the medical director of Maine's emergency air ambulance service, has described the case load we see each day as like seeing the light from a distant star: the daily confirmed infection number reflects exposure from up to two weeks ago and with each new update we are actually looking at the past.
With that said, we are blessed in Maine to have several things on our side, and we are lucky that's the case as with the oldest average age of any state in the union, a higher incidence of pre-existing conditions that put people in the high risk category, and a fantastic but small and underfunded network of hospitals we could be in trouble if we don't stay on top of things and take advantage of our strengths.
High on the list of strengths are our Governor, Janet Mills, who is a whip-smart and plan spoken pragmatist; and Dr. Nirav Shah who directs the Maine Centers for Disease Control, the state agency responsible for directing our local pandemic response.
Dr. Shah is relatively new to Maine but his work in recent weeks has fast-tracked his acceptance by a normally stand-offish state and one wag even noted that they bet a lot of boys born in 9 months of so will be named Nirav! Calm, clear, and reassuring while never sugar coating the news, Dr. Shah has become a Maine icon over the course of the last month, not least for his fondness for comparing this situation to the fiction of another notable Mainer, the author Stephen King.
We also feel, or at least hope, our natural and built environment will help us in this fight. To help provide context to friends from Europe I often describe Maine as being the size of Scotland with the population of Glasgow.
Aside from the small city of Portland and it's environs (population around 300,000) most Mainers live in small towns and villages, and the further away from the southern third of the state the further apart and smaller these communities become. When you add in the New Englander's propensity to avoid being too demonstrative and effusive in social settings, the physical distancing required is relatively easy to maintain.
Our reputation as a safe and remote place is also exposing some long existing fault lines however, as summer residents, second home owners, and others looking to leave big cities and infection hot spots are running into concern and fear from the communities they see as part time homes and year-round residents see as dangerously exposed and under-resourced should the summer people come back early and fall sick.
State government have mandated a 14 day quarantine for anyone arriving from out of state and most folks are looking to walk the line between being welcoming while being safe by urging friends, family, and part time residents who find themselves elsewhere to stay there, at least for now.
On a personal level, my wife, 12 year old daughter, and our energetic dog are making the most of working- and learning from home. it is fortunate that we all happen to like each other's company and are able to focus on work and school fairly easily (and there are always long marches with the dog to blow off steam).
The incredible connectivity provided by the internet also helps keep things manageable as demonstrated recently by the three of us collaborating on an online challenge to turn our bathroom into a 'glamorous night out' complete with disco ball.
As the the state is under a "Stay at Home" order from Governor Mills I expect the level of creativity (or lunacy, depending on your point of view) will only increase.
Never before been so grateful for the garden
Kateryna McKinnon works as European manager at the Scottish agency, Highlands and Islands Enterprise, developing collaborative projects with international partners on business and community development. When we spoke shortly before Easter, she had just finished an online meeting with partners in Copenhagen about a cooperation project on rural food, drink and tourism, bringing together organisations in northern parts of Scotland and Scandinavia - the Faroe Islands, Greenland, Norway and Iceland - in other words from sparsely populated areas in the North, that are all vulnerable to the economic situations bound to follow in COVID-19’s path.
Kateryna lives with her husband and two sons on the outskirts of Inverness, a city of some 60 thousand people, often referred to as the cultural capital of the Scottish Highlands. Like the rest of Scotland and the UK, her household was placed on lockdown on March 24th and she says the time since has made her even more appreciative of the place she lives in, now more than ever.
“The rules are quite simple; stay at home, keep a 2 metre distance, only one person per household can go for essential grocery shopping. Also, once per day you are allowed to go out to exercise and in that case family members of the same household can go together as long as they abide by the social distance rule. These restrictions, to which people at least around here are quite compliant with, have made me more appreciative of things that I guess we took for granted before. Like living in a house with a garden you can always go out in and where the boys can play,” says Kateryna.
“You also appreciate those once-daily walks in the neighbourhood, although taking a walk these days can also feel somewhat bizarre. Here, like in most small communities, we are used to smiling, being friendly, saying good morning, afternoon or evening when we pass other people in the street and might even stop for a chat. That is very much just gone now.
For a start the streets are empty and everything is quiet. When you are walking and another person comes your way, that can be a bit strange. You both start swaying a bit ahead to avoid closeness and when passing people tend to look down, no smiles and no eye contact. People are just in a hurry to get past you. In some cases, people cross the street to avoid coming close! And we do the same - which makes me feel sad really...
But this situation also brings out so much good in people. Like putting notes through the doors of elderly or vulnerable neighbours offering help, or sending a text like we have done for two elderly couples in our street to see if there is anything they need. Quite often these people are so thankful to not have to go to the shop themselves. The teddy bears and the rainbows in every window. But I also feel that in these last weeks the overall appreciation of the seriousness of this virus has grown. Especially since our prime minister was infected and hospitalised in intensive care. He did not belong to any risk-group as such, so the news became somewhat of a wake-up call I think for this nation. Anyone can get Coronavirus.
On the subject of hospitals, it has been quite wonderful to witness the warm, growing appreciation of our health care workers and what the National Health Service, the NHS, is doing for our country. Both prime minister Boris Johnson and first minister Nicola Sturgeon have been tireless in thanking and praising the NHS in their daily speeches and every Thursday we all go outside at eight o’clock to clap for the NHS. That is the one time of the week where we actually see just about everyone who lives on our street because everyone comes out to clap. Afterwards you may get text messages from neighbours saying “I saw you all clapping, how are you holding up, are you staying safe and healthy?” and so on.
So people may not be seeing much of each other these days, but they find ways to show they care. And I also feel there is along with it a growing understanding of just how important it is to comply with the restrictions that have been made and will probably not be leaving us anytime soon.” says Kateryna McKinnon in Scotland.
The European manager for the Higlands and Islands Enterprise working from home.
A sign that also tells you to be grateful for living with your children in a house with a garden! JONAA©Kateryna
For a while the NHS clap at eight every evenong has been the highlight of the day, everyone comes out. JONAA©Kateryna
Greenland’s lifeline. The all important Bombardier Dash-8 that flies COVID-19 tests from Greenland and returns with medical supplies. JONAA©Kasper Zeeb
Greenland’s little red lifeline against COVID-19
- Ajaana Arndís Kristjánsdóttir explains how her country has faced the crisis with a DASH-8 propellor plane as its main tool
The first case of COVID-19 in Greenland was discovered on March 16th and as of April 15th the total of cases number 11 and those 11 have all recovered. No new cases have been detected so far.
These numbers may seem small and manageable from a global perspective, but for Greenland, each case poses a great threat and authorities were quick to decide on a lock-down and no-foreign-entry as soon as the second case of COVID-19 was detected. Since March 18th Greenland has been on lock-down, not only to the outside world but within the country as well.
Greenland is the largest island in the world, being 2.166.086 km2 (1.106.602 m2) in size. It has 72 towns and settlements spread along the island’s coastline, in addition to the capital of Nuuk, where approximately 18.000 people live and where the nine COVID-19 cases were found.
The country’s total population numbers approximately 57.000 people, mainly Kalaallit (Inuit) and distances between habited places – and medical facilities – are often great. For instance, one of the northernmost settlements in Greenland, Qaanaaq, is approximately 1500 km (932 m) from the nearest fully equipped hospital in Nuuk, and the only hospital in the country where COVID-19 could be dealt with.
These great distances and lack of medical facilities make it crucial for authorities to keep the pandemic under control and to keep unaffected towns and settlements in isolation. The fact that Greenland is a country where no two habited places are linked by roads helps to make this happen, but the most important factor in the country’s response to the pandemic, was the decision to ground Air Greenland’s operations, internationally and domestically.
The airline has often been referred to as Greenland’s lifeline, transporting people and cargo throughout the country and operating emergency flights, helicopter shuttles, search & rescue operations and so on. On a normal day, Air Greenland operates around 45 domestic flights in addition to operating a route to Copenhagen in Denmark and to Iceland. All flights have now been stopped until the 30th of April – in hope of stopping COVID-19’s pathway as well.
But COVID-19 testing results cannot be done in Greenland.
So in this critical situation, a little red and much loved “lifeline” has emerged in the form of a Bombardier Dash-8. A small 37 passenger propeller plane, the type that makes up the bulk of the domestic fleet, but now only flies from Nuuk to Copenhagen; an 8-hour journey in total via Iceland – bringing COVID-19 tests to Danish laboratories and returning with important medical supplies and other necessities.
The set up of Air Greenland’s COVID-19 flights is that, weather-permitting, 6 mornings per week, one Dash-8 departs Copenhagen airport and another departs Nuuk. The two planes then meet in Iceland, COVID-19 tests and medical supplies are exchanged and both planes return to where they came from. This air-bridge is Greenland’s only “physical” connection with the outside world now during the crisis. ▢
Vilborg Einarsdottir is the Editor-in-Chief of JONAA, the Journal of the North Atlantic & Arctic and a JONAA partner & founder. Formally a journalist for 12 years at Morgunblaðið in Iceland, she has worked since 1996 as a specialised producer of film, photography and media productions on extreme locations in Arctic Greenland and as a cultural producer in the Nordic-Arctic region. She is an awarded film and documentary scriptwriter, experienced project manager and editor of photography books from the Arctic.
Ajaana Arndis Olsvig Kristjansdottir is JONAA’s social media coordinator and a writer for both JONAA and IceNews. Of both Greenlandic and Icelandic origin, Ajaana grew up in Greenland but attended university in Iceland for her studies in Tourism, a field she has worked in in both countries. Ajaana speaks both West and East Greenlandic, in addition to Icelandic and several other languages - a valuable skill for a media focusing in the Arctic to have onboard.
