Coronatimes in Copenhagen — Letter From Lockdown, Day 8

Augusta Khalil Ibrahim
Coronatimes in Copenhagen
6 min readMar 18, 2020

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Isolation Diary

Irina Grotkjær on Unsplash

We’ve been in government-mandated lockdown here in Denmark for a week now. I am at home with my teenage son; his twin brother is at a friend’s, also in isolation and my big boy, also a teenager, is at his dad’s.

We are all deeply distressed by the situation in Italy. Healthcare personnel are experiencing 10% mortality and the general population is traumatized. You can’t even have a decent funeral. You can’t even have a funeral, let alone a decent one, because of the backlog.

A lady a few streets away, in her forties, was carried away by ambulance earlier today. I hear the sirens a couple of times a day. All shopping centres shut down yesterday, except for supermarkets. There was an ambulance parked outside my house this evening.

No Testing Unless In Extremis

Most people responded with shock, disbelief and denial the first few days but now we’re getting used to it. The government is saying only old and immunocompromised people are in real danger but that’s not what eyewitnesses in Italy are saying. Nobody is testing here. If you are ill, you are advised to stay home unless you begin to get complications so the official figures are grossly underrepresented. The first two people who died, they weren’t tested until…

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