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Denmark to ease travel restrictions: When and how can I enter or leave?

The Danish government has announced a four-stage plan to lift the country’s restrictions on international travel.

Published: 14 April 2021 15:34 CEST

Denmark to ease travel restrictions: When and how can I enter or leave?

Aircraft landing at Copenhagen Airport. Photo: Mads Claus Rasmussen/Ritzau Scanpix

Restrictions are to be eased in four phases, beginning on April 21st and reaching completion by June 26th, should everything go to plan.

The plan only applies to travel to and from countries in the EU and Schengen zone, however. That means restrictions for so-called “third countries” outside of the EU and Schengen area will follow the common approach adopted by the EU, which is expected to be renegotiated prior to the summer, according to the agreement text.

As such, people who live in the United Kingdom as well as the United States will continue to be subject to tight travel rules as Denmark lifts restrictions on European travel, despite the relatively advanced stage of vaccination programmes in both the UK and the US.

The agreement provides for travel restrictions to be updated weekly based on local situations with the virus in individual countries and regions in the EU and Schengen area.

The four separate phases are detailed below, followed by an outline of the current joint EU policy on travel from outside the bloc. The EU rules which will remain in effect for nationals of all third countries, including the UK.

Dates are not final – health authorities will provide assessment and political parties will meet for negotiations at least one week before each new phase takes effect.

Phase 1: April 21st

Foreign ministry to lift blanket advice against all foreign travel. Instead, three categorisations for travel recommendations: “red”, “orange” and “yellow”. The categories will reflect local infection rates as well as the presence of mutations considered a “concern” by authorities.
Weekly updates on travel advice for individual countries to return.
People who travel from “yellow” countries or regions not required to isolate on arrival in Denmark.
Business travellers no longer required to isolate.
Danes who own remote holiday homes termed ødegård in other Nordic countries no longer required to isolate.
List of “worthy” reasons which enable non-tourist travel into the country to be extended: people attending certain types of Danish residential schools (højskoler and efterskoler), international students, spouses or partners and children of Danes who live abroad now allowed to enter Denmark (in the latter case they must be travelling together with the Danish family member).

Phase 2: May 1st

Fully-vaccinated Danes, residents of Denmark and tourists from “yellow” and “orange” countries can travel in and out of Denmark free from testing and isolation requirements.
Requirement to document a recent negative Covid-19 test at border changed: must now be 48 hours old or less (currently 24 hours).

Phase 3: around May 14th

This phase will be allowed to take effect once all people in Denmark over the age of 50 have been vaccinated against Covid-19 (excluding those who choose not to take it).
Incidence rates used in travel criteria eased: yellow and orange zones can now have up to 50 and 60 (respectively) cases per 100,000 residents in last week (currently 20/30 per 100,000).
Yellow countries no longer require “worthy” cause for entry or isolation; normal tourists allowed to enter.
Orange countries no longer require “worthy” cause for entry.
Persons, including tourists, from regions bordering Denmark no longer required to isolate.

Phase 4: June 26th

This phase will be allowed to take effect when the EU’s vaccine passport scheme has been implemented.
The vaccine passport will provide for Danes to holiday in Europe and tourists from the EU and Schengen area to travel to Denmark for tourism.
Test requirement remains in place for non-vaccinated people from orange countries.
People without vaccine passports will remain subject to travel restrictions and anti-infection measures.

Source: Ministry of Justice

The above phases do not apply to people who live in the UK or any other non-EU or Schengen area country. For those countries, the joint restrictions adopted by the EU for third country travel remain in effect until the EU renegotiates or otherwise changes them.

Those rules are:

Any non-resident of the EU country (in this case, Denmark) travelling from outside the EU (including the UK) needs to demonstrate they have an essential reason for entering the country.

This allows work or study-related travel but rules out tourism, family visits or visits from second home owners. The full list of those who are allowed to travel is:

Citizens of an EU country or non-EU citizens who are permanent residents of an EU country and need to come home
Healthcare workers engaged in crucial work on the coronavirus crisis
Frontier workers and in some circumstances seasonal workers
Delivery drivers
Diplomats, humanitarian or aid workers
Passengers in transit
Passengers travelling for imperative family reasons
Persons in need of international protection or for other humanitarian reasons
Third country nationals travelling for the purpose of study
Highly qualified third-country workers IF their employment is essential from an economic perspective and cannot be postponed or performed abroad.

Member comments

E Gustafson - 14 April 2021 at 18:46 CEST

From my understanding – according to Coronasmitte.dk – under “Worthy Purposes of Entry into Denmark” – family IS included and allowed in – even non-EU family.

“You can enter Denmark if you are the spouse, live-in partner, fiancé, sweetheart, parent, stepparent, grandparent, step-grandparent, child, stepchild, sister, brother, stepsister, stepbrother, grandchild or stepgrandchild of a Danish national resident in or permanently staying in Denmark or of a foreigner resident in Denmark.”
1. jakeb1rnie - 15 April 2021 at 11:38 CEST
  
  That does seem to be the case – I’ve just checked this as well, albeit with my translator. Hopefully my 3 month old can now meet her grandparents 🙂
  1. E Gustafson - 15 April 2021 at 14:29 CEST
    
    Here is the Coronasmitte site in English – scroll down to worthy purpose to enter and it definitely allows parents of residents to come meet their grandchild. There are rules and protocols to do so, but they are allowed in if they follow them. Sounds like a worthy purpose indeed. Tillykke.
    1. E Gustafson - 15 April 2021 at 14:29 CEST
      
      https://en.coronasmitte.dk/rules-and-regulations/entry-into-denmark/persons-resident-in-countries-outside-of-denmark

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FACT CHECK: Did Sweden have lower pandemic mortality than Denmark and Norway?

At one point in May 2020, Sweden had the highest Covid-19 death rate in the world, spurring newspapers like the New York Times and Time Magazine to present the country as a cautionary tale, a warning of how much more Covid-19 could ravage populations if strict enough measures were not applied.

“Per million people, Sweden has suffered 40 percent more deaths than the United States, 12 times more than Norway, seven times more than Finland and six times more than Denmark,” the New York Times reported in July 2020.

An article in Time in October 2020 declared Sweden’s Covid response “a disaster”, citing figures from Johns Hopkins University ranking Sweden’s per capita death rate as the 12th highest in the world.

So there was undisguised glee among lockdown sceptics when Svenska Dagbladet published its data last week showing that in the pandemic years 2020, 2021 and 2022 Sweden’s excess mortality was the lowest, not only in the European Union, but of all the Nordic countries, beating even global Covid-19 success stories, such as Norway, Denmark and Finland.

Versions of the graph or links to the story were tweeted out by international anti-lockdown figures such as Bjørn Lomborg, a Danish sceptic of climate action, and Fraser Nelson, editor of Britain’s Spectator Magazine, while in Sweden columnists like Dagens Nyheter’s Alex Schulman and Svenska Dagbladet’s opinion editor Peter Wennblad showed that Anders Tegnell, the state epidemiologist who led Sweden’s strategy had been “right all along”.

Excess mortality — the number of people who die in a year compared to the number expected to die based on previous years — is seen by some statisticians as a better measure for comparing countries’ Covid-19 responses, as it is less vulnerable to differences in how Covid-19 deaths are reported.

But are these figures legitimate, where do they come from, and do they show what they purport to show?

Here are the numbers used by SvD in its chart:

Where do the numbers come from?

Örjan Hemström, a statistician specialising in births and deaths at Sweden’s state statistics agency Statistics Sweden (SCB), put together the figures at the request of Svenska Dagbladet.

He told The Local that the numbers published in the newspaper came from him and had not been doctored in any way by the journalists.

He did, however, point out that he had produced an alternative set of figures for the Nordic countries, which the newspaper chose not to use, in which Sweden had exactly the same excess mortality as Denmark and Norway.

“I think they also could have published the computation I did for the Nordic countries of what was expected from the population predictions,” he said of the way SvD had used his numbers. “It takes into consideration trends in mortality by age and sex. The excess deaths were more similar for Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. Almost the same.”

Here are Hemström’s alternative numbers:

Another issue with the analysis is that the SvD graph compares deaths in the pandemic years to deaths over just three years, a mean of 2017-2019, and does not properly take into account Sweden’s longstanding declining mortality trend, or the gently rising mortality trend in some other countries where mortality is creeping upwards due to an ageing population, such as Finland.

“It’s very difficult to compare countries and the longer the pandemic goes on for the harder it is, because you need a proper baseline, and that baseline depends on what happened before,” Karin Modig, an epidemiologist at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute whose research focuses on ageing populations, told The Local.

“As soon as you compare between countries, it’s more difficult because countries have different trends of mortality, they have different age structures, and in the pandemic they might have had different seasonal variations.”

She described analyses such as Hemström’s as “quite crude”.

In an interview with SvD to accompany the graph, Tegnell also pushed back against giving the numbers too much weight.

“Mortality doesn’t tell the whole story about what effect a pandemic has had on different countries,” he said. “The excess mortality measure has its weaknesses and depends a lot on the demographic structures of countries, but anyway, when it comes to that measure, it looks like Sweden managed to do quite well.”

Do the numbers match those provided by other international experts and media?

Sweden’s excess mortality over the three years of the pandemic is certainly below average worldwide, but it is only in the SvD/SCB figures that it beats Norway and Denmark.

A ranking of excess mortality put together by Our World in Data for the same period as the SvD/SCB table estimates Sweden’s excess mortality between the start of 2020 and the end of 2022 at 5.62 percent, considerably more than the 4.4 percent SvD claims and above that of Norway on 5.08 percent and Denmark on 2.52 percent.

The Economist newspaper also put together an estimate, using their own method based on projected deaths.

Our World in Data uses the estimate produced by Ariel Karlinsky and Dmitry Kobak, who manage the World Mortality Dataset (WMD). To produce the estimate, they fit a regression model for each region using historical deaths data from 2015–2019, so a time period of five years rather than the three used by SCB.

What’s clear, is that, whatever method you use, Sweden is, along with the other Nordic countries, among the countries with the lowest excess mortality over the pandemic.

“Most methods seem to put Sweden and the other Nordic countries among the countries in Europe with the lowest cumulative excess deaths for 2020-2022,” said Preben Aavitsland, the Director for Surveillance and the Norwegian Institute of Public Health.

So if Sweden had similar excess mortality as the other Nordics over the period, does that mean it had a similar Covid-19 death rate?

Not at all. Sweden’s per capita death rate from Covid-19 over the period covered by the SvD/SCB figures, at 2,249 per million people, is more than double Norway’s 959 per million, 60 percent more than the 1,409 per million who died in Denmark, and more than 50 percent more than the 1,612 per million who died in Finland.

While Sweden’s death rate is still far ahead of those of its Nordic neighbours, it is now much closer to theirs than it was at the end of 2020.

“The most striking difference between Sweden and the other Nordic countries is that only Sweden had large excess mortality in 2020 and the winter of 2020-21,” Aavitsland explained. “In 2022, the field levelled out as the other countries also had excess mortality when most of the population was infected by the omicron variant after all measures had been lifted.”

So why, if the Covid-19 death rates are still so different, are the excess mortality rates so similar?

This largely reflects the fact that many of those who died in Sweden in the first year of the pandemic were elderly people in care homes who would have died anyway by the end of 2022.

About 90 percent of Covid-19 deaths were in people above 70, Aavitsland pointed out, adding that this is the same age group where you find around 80 percent of all deaths, regardless of cause, in a Scandinavian country.

“My interpretation is that in the first year of the pandemic, say March 2020 – February 2021, Sweden had several thousand excess deaths among the elderly, including nursing home residents,” he said. “Most of this was caused by Covid-19. In the other [Nordic] countries, more people like these survived, but they died in 2022. The other countries managed to delay some deaths, but now, three years after, we end up at around the same place.”

So does that mean Sweden’s state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell was right all along?

It depends on how you view the shortened lives of the close to ten thousand elderly people who caught Covid-19 and died in Sweden in the first wave because Sweden did not follow the example of Denmark, Norway, and Finland and bring in a short three-week lockdown in March and April 2020.

Tegnell himself probably said it best in the SvD interview.

“You’ve got to remember that a lot of people died in the pandemic, which is of course terrible in many ways, not least for their many loved ones who were affected, so you need to be a bit humble when presented with these kinds of figures.”

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