REYKJAVIK, Iceland — Gestur Palmason has spent the past few weeks running down leads and profiling suspects, but those whom the veteran police detective is chasing aren’t criminals, they are coronavirus carriers.
The 40-year-old with a shaved head is part of a team of “contact tracers” operating at Iceland’s National Crisis Coordination Center, the high-pressure heart of this small country’s singular strategy to combat COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.
“Every second somebody is getting infected, so obviously we want as few people infected as we possibly can,” he told NBC News. “As quickly as we can, we have to reach everyone that might have been in contact with someone who’s positive, and try to stop them before they get in contact with more people.”
Together with dozens of other top detectives, Palmason has been racing to locate individuals who have been in close physical proximity to known carriers of the virus — often just minutes after the original carriers receive a positive diagnosis. The people he helps identify are almost immediately placed in a two-week quarantine to prevent further transmission.
Across this remote and rugged island nation of a little more than 364,000, as of Friday morning there were almost 10,000 men, women and children — equivalent to 9 million Americans — under this form of state-enforced lock and key.
These contact-tracing and quarantine measures are only part of what make Iceland unique in its response to the pandemic. It is also testing widely and proactively in a way that few other countries are able to do, allowing emergency workers to make informed decisions that they hope will minimize the impact of the coronavirus. Plus, its civil servants and scientists are leading the coronavirus response, while the country’s politicians take a back seat.
Search and separate
Rapid diagnosis is essential to the efficacy of chief inspector Palmason’s work. And earlier this week it was his turn to be tested, on the fourth floor of a glass office building in the Icelandic capital.
Medical staff in full personal protective equipment swabbed the back of his throat and deep inside his nostrils, before he returned to his temporarily assigned workspace, where distinct shift patterns separate his team from other co-workers to avoid cross-contamination. He later said he had tested negative.
Last week, up to 1,800 people were tested in a single day; Iceland has tested a far greater proportion of its population than anywhere else on earth, including South Korea — another country touted for its effective response to the pandemic.
But what makes Iceland unique is that test samples are not only taken from ‘high risk’ individuals who have exhibited symptoms, came into contact with known carriers, or returned from countries such as China and Italy, they are also offered to thousands of ordinary members of its general population, who are nonsymptomatic.
The data derived from this widespread testing show that while almost a fifth of those from the ‘high risk’ population prove positive for COVID-19, roughly 1 percent of the general population also carry the virus ‘asy