After 36 crew members and three passengers on a Hurtigruten ship were confirmed to be infected with the coronavirus, Norwegian authorities fear a larger outbreak.

In total, residents from 69 Norwegian municipalities were on board the ship.

The Norwegian Institute of Public Health warns of further outbreaks in the wake of the spread of infection found on the Hurtigruten ship Roald Amundsen.

Around 40 passengers were quarantined in Tromsø, where the ship docked. But hundreds of passengers have returned home to their municipalities.

”"We are concerned that we may have more outbreaks after this, yes. It is already a large outbreak and we are concerned that the scale will be larger than what we are seeing now," says Line Vold, department director at the National Institute of Public Health.

She urges everyone passengers who traveled on the ship in July, when cruise operations resumed, to get tested. The Public Health Institute has also asked all municipalities linked to the outbreak to submit lists of everyone who has been tested and their results.

Line Vold also criticizes Hurtigruten, which did not begin the work of informing passengers about the risk of infection until two days after the first cases were found. Hurtigruten has now sent information to all passengers who were on board any of the previous cruises and has been in telephone contact with most of them.

Of the 36 crew members who tested positive, four are still hospitalized at the University Hospital of Northern Norway in Tromsø. Hurtigruten has now updated its infection control rules, and from now on requires all crew members to undergo a ten-day quarantine before being allowed to work on the company's ships.

Source: TT