Norway Says It Has the Virus “Under Control”

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: What would you say is the reason for you having to — having this under control so relatively quickly? What did you do in the beginning that led you to this point, way before many other countries?

ERNA SOLBERG, NORWEGIAN PRIME MINISTER: I think we — first of all, we have monitored very closely all of those who have become ill, those who came back from winter holidays in hot spots like Northern Italy and Austria. That was a big number of people that had been on ski holidays there. And when we saw that the numbers of people who — that they become — there were patients coming saying that they had — they didn’t know when where they had gotten the disease. Then we closed down schools. We closed down a lot of activities in our country. We closed down a lot of small businesses and said that you cannot — when you do person-to-person business, when you are — then we have to close down the activities. Of course, everything of concerts, matches in football, all of the sports events was closed down quite rapidly. That means that it’s not allowed, in fact, for people to be more than five people gathering together outdoors in Norway. And we have told people that you should not — the children should not have more than one or two stable friends to make sure that they do not contaminate each other and that there is an inside families and that there are — people who are sick, you really have to stay at home. But we have not closed down all shops. We have made sure that some of the activity continues.

AMANPOUR: OK. OK. So, now to the treatments and the vaccines. You have heard that President Trump has been touting chloroquine. And, certainly, a rather iconoclastic French doctor has been behind all of this, the chloroquine treatment. Do you believe in chloroquine? And what are you doing? Because I know Norway is working very hard on a treatment that’s soon to get human trials and also on a vaccine. Tell me about that.

SOLBERG: Yes. Well, first of all, I believe that it’s not politicians, it is the scientists who have to decide what is the good medicine. So, we are sponsoring a large program with the World Health Organization. It is led by a Norwegian, but they are working with trials of different types of medication around in different countries around the world, under the leadership of the World Health Organization, so that we can see which type of medicines can, in fact, stop the disease, which can make the impact lower during a period where people are sick, so that we get a really scientific basis for that. And then, of course, one of the things we really are working on is to make sure that we have vaccines in the future.