Quote:

---

Anyone who'd spent more than fifteen minutes near the man in the days before he'd experienced his first symptoms was considered potentially infected. ("Near" was defined as within a radius of two metres, or just over six feet.) The team came up with a list of fifty-six names. By midnight, all fifty-six contacts had been located and ordered to quarantine themselves for fourteen days.

The first case was followed by three more cases, then by six, and then by an onslaught. By mid-March, confirmed covid cases in Iceland were increasing at a rate of sixty, seventy, even a hundred a day. As a proportion of the country's population, this was far faster than the rate at which cases in the United States were growing. The number of people the tracing team was tracking down, meanwhile, was rising even more quickly. An infected person might have been near five other people, or fifty-six, or more. One young woman was so active before she tested positive - going to classes, rehearsing a play, attending choir practice - that her contacts numbered close to two hundred. All were sent into quarantine.

The tracing team, too, kept growing, until it had fifty-two members. They worked in shifts out of conference rooms in a Reykjavk hotel that had closed for lack of tourists. To find people who had been exposed, team members scanned airplane manifests and security-camera footage. They tried to pinpoint who was sitting next to whom on buses and in lecture halls. One man who fell ill had recently attended a concert. The only person he remembered having had contact with while there was his wife. But the tracing team did some sleuthing and found that after the concert there had been a reception.

"In this gathering, people were hugging, and eating from the same trays," Plmason told me. "So the decision was made - all of them go into quarantine." If you were returning to Iceland from overseas, you also got a call: put yourself in quarantine. At the same time, the country was aggressively testing for the viruson a per-capita basis, at the highest rate in the world.

Iceland never imposed a lockdown. Only a few types of businesses - night clubs and hair salons, for example - were ever ordered closed. Hardly anyone in Reykjavk wears a mask. And yet, by mid-May, when I went to talk to Plmason, the tracing team had almost no one left to track. During the previous week, in all of Iceland, only two new coronavirus cases had been confirmed. The country hadn't just managed to flatten the curve; it had, it seemed, virtually eliminated it.

---