Dear Dr. Durrani,

thanks a lot for your helpfl advice. Unfortunately, I don't have sufficient access to statista. If you have a PDF version of the text, I would be very happy.

Warm greetings from Göttingen

Ottomar Bahrs

Fairly extensive testing. At an early stage the health workers and cooperators did a thorough job tracking contact persons around the infected. When the tracing started to become difficult in most cases the health department and government locked schools, kindergartens, cultural institutions, hotels, cinemas, any activity involving human contact, except the most important health care and businesses.

Buinesses, like our office, started to use home offices, and a minimalisation of bus- and common transport use. Minimalisation of traveling. Part of the success is likely to come from peoples voluntary work habit in Norway, I believe. We listened to the health experts.

Possibly the helath department do have good crisis plans, although much of the process seem to have been imporvised, at least in the beginning. The helath care system is good in Norway. But we have a falrly limited access to intensive care stations in our hospitals, less than, say, Sweden. So Norway had to act early. The responsibility for tracking and dealing with the spread was local.

Dear Anders, thank you for the interesting information "from the inside". I have a question on top: which professional groups were involved locally? Were the responsibilities regulated institutionally or did this happen spontaneously locally?

That would be people working in the health related areas in the local communities. Calling every possible contact it is a very demanding and time consuming process. In smaller communitites, I basically think that also non health related personel have been doing tracing and calling as well. They probaly do have emergency plans in each "Kommune" to deal with crisis like this. And to some extent they will have to improvise. The highest density of cases has been in the large cities and most in Oslo.

I found one article on the subject here from two academics from the Bergen University. It is about one month old. It is open access: https://www.uib.no/en/admorg/136086/successful-handling-covid-19-norway

An other article, not peer rewieved, but newer and more on the technical model level regarding the virus spreading and control measures. Preprint How to evaluate the success of the COVID-19 measures impleme...

Thanks a lot. This information reminds me of the situation in Germany - the institutional measures are well documented and the successes in narrowing down the pandemic are undeniable. But it is also clear that the implementation takes place locally, and I lack information about how the people involved could create helpful relationships, helpful cooperations and helpful settings. In other words, the bottom-up perspective has so far been lacking in research.