Out of my Element

Do that here and you'll be unemployed in a day or two

bluesaturn

Why no masks? Why not half classes or distance learning? Maybe the PM should do his duty, take responsibility, and do a better job.

GUWonder

Sweden’s Royal Academy of Sciences — the institution that picks Nobel Prize winners in say Physics and in Chemistry — has come out in favor of mask use. This should be taken as a sign of domestic opposition to Tegnell&Co’s hostility toward mask use in Sweden.

Let’s see if we see more of the anti-mask crowd suddenly claim as their cause that mask use will exacerbate the public divide between the haves and the have-nots in Sweden.

VickiSoCal

Quick, hopefully, question for friend. She is in Iceland (citizen there) and needs to visit family in Gothenburg. She plans to fly to Copenhagen then ground transit onwards. Will she be allowed?

GUWonder

I've seen it work, at least for those Iceland-residing Icelandic citizens that I have seen visiting some of my Icelandic neighbors/acquaintances here in southern Sweden.

It works most easily if the person has a Covid-19 test result showing sub-72 hour negative result + being able to show a train ticket to go from CPH airport to at least Malmo (if not even to Gothenburg) in case the airline asks. [For the train ticket, I and my travel party members have shown a flexible CPH-Malmo ticket purchased on the Skanetrafiken App that we leave as a stored ticket for activation later.]

At CPH itself -- and on the return to CPH from Malmo -- any* encountered Danish border control default to letting Icelandic citizens to transit CPH to enter Sweden or fly home via CPH. It may help if she has any stuff that shows her relatives are resident in Sweden and how they are relatives. Way less than all of this has worked to come to Sweden via CPH, but the more such stuff the traveler has, the less likely the airline makes a fuss. And it's the airline that is most commonly the primary show stopper for people like Icelandic visitors to Sweden via CPH+surface crossing to Sweden.

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* And that is literally any, since I am not sure it's a given for all these flights from within the Schengen area even now to encounter Danish passport control on arrival at CPH.

GUWonder

Showing the CPH-Malmo/Gothenburg train ticket should mean the Icelandic national flying from Iceland to Copenhagen to then cross the bridge to go to Sweden means the person is probably exempted from the Covid-19 test result show. But that could require convincing the airline that the Covid-19 test result is not required for "transit passengers, provided they have a worthy purpose to travel through Denmark". Given CPH is closer to GOT than ARN and using CPH to transit to get to relatives in Sweden is arguably a "worthy purpose", showing the train ticket has worked even without the Covid-19 test results.

CPH/Denmark formally requires masks for use at the airport, on the train platforms, and also on the train across the bridge. Just something to keep in mind.

vanillabean

"You can travel through Denmark (transit) if you have a worthy purpose outside Denmark or if you are going on holiday outside Denmark, the Faroe Islands and Greenland. This applies regardless of your habitual residence and your means of transport. In such situations, you are not required to present proof of a negative COVID-19 test.
...
You can travel through Denmark (transit) if you have a worthy purpose outside Denmark. The transit should be made without undue delay. This applies regardless of your habitual residence and your means of transport."

https://coronasmitte.dk/en/entry-int...ons-in-transit

Im a new user

Besides, the KEF-ARN route seems to have been cancelled. Icelandair suggests a KEF-CPH-ARN routing. Flying KEF-CPH and then a train is obviously more convenient than KEF-CPH-ARN and then a train.

GUWonder

On my last US-CPH-Sweden trip this month, Danish passport control accepted my word that I was in transit to Sweden via the bridge; and she did so merely by way of my US passport and the evidence of me having proof of admissibility into Sweden; that claim of being in transit to southern Sweden was sufficient to be waived from being asked for a sub-72 hour Covid-19 test or any of the other papers being closely examined by the Danish passport control agents when it came to most other non-Danes clearing Danish passport control. Yes, I was literally the last from my flight to clear since I hung back for as long as possible until the non-Schengen side looked pretty much like a ghost town beside the two Danish policewomen staffing the booths. The CPH egates are shut off at least for entry into Denmark IME, so everyone was being manually processed. For what it’s worth I did choose to be processed by the person who has seen me less at CPH than if I had picked the one who has repeatedly commented about the size of one of my US passports.

VickiSoCal

Thanks all! She will be getting tested before leaving anyways I think as she is going to help with a new grandbaby and that seems wise, but it is good to know all the eventualities.

vanillabean

You are one smooth operator! I knew we should have stuck to a few days in Gotland first like we had planned for this summer, but then the pandemic came around and I chickened out. Instead we took a nonstop SFO-CPH roundtrip a month ago.

So there we were at paskontrollen that you described. It was pretty empty, so we walked up to one of the windows and fell into that way of talking that comes naturally, Dane to Dane. The rules, if you dig deep enough, say that neither the Danish citizen nor the spouse, even foreign and living in a banned country, need a test.

She didn’t agree. At first she wouldn’t even let us into the country. Eventually she settled for us taking a test in the tent just outside on the street that I had read much about and secretly wanted to check out anyway. And we were going to stay in my brother’s summer house the first 48 hours just in case. As we left, the woman in the neighboring window nodded approvingly.

Following the test while waiting for my brother to pick us up, I took the ten minute stroll down the street from the airport meet & greet and entered the police building. The very nice man there spoke with his highest superior, and of course there was no way we had to take the test. He was quite baffled when I on my way out told him passport control had asked me to.

The trip took off. And then one day it was over, and we were once again at passport control, heading for the gate this time. It was deader than a graveyard at midnight. Two windows were open, and only one other passenger was in sight. Looking at my wife’s American passport, one window jokingly asked her if she was seeking asylum.

And just as we had passed the windows, I took a look to the left and went back in line like when we first arrived. I asked her hypothetically whether I as a Danish citizen needed to be tested to enter the country. Oh no, you don’t. And how about my American wife then? Yes, she does. But she can walk up the stairs right here and be tested! And on that cheerful note, I bid her and her curious colleague farewell.

Im a new user

But what proof of admissibility into Sweden did you show? If you showed a Swedish residence permit, then it was probably obvious that you were going to Sweden. Same if someone shows a Swedish passport (unless arriving from ARN or some other Swedish airport). For an Icelandic citizen, it's maybe better to bring evidence that you're going to Sweden, like a train ticket to Gothenburg and correspondence with the relatives about the trip.

I think I once read somewhere on the website of the Danish police that airlines don't have to check if the person is admissible to Denmark if the person arrives from a Schengen country (so no fine for the airline if entry is declined), but I can't find it so it could have been changed and I don't think that the information ever was in TIMATIC so airlines wouldn't know.

GUWonder

I think the Danish border control at the booths - and nowadays it's way more likely to be women working the booths there than has been the norm pre-2020 -- tend to make more of an issue with a chunk of passengers than is required. Maybe it's a consequence of having too much time on their hands since there just aren't that many arriving passengers to keep them from getting bored; and/or maybe it's because they want to encourage arriving passengers to get tested even when not legally required or to otherwise make a show of the thing and keep people from encouraging unnecessary travel by saying it's not so hard to travel nowadays.

They do seem to go slower with Danes with non-EU/EEA spouses trying to use the spousal exemption. The last I saw was an American-Danish couple trying to come back with one of their American cats.

In my earlier post about visits by Icelandic nationals wanting to use CPH to get to Sweden, I referred to the use of the train ticket via the Skanetrafiken app and having a purchased/stored (but non-activated) ticket there and much else that can facilitate things with the airlines and at times even Danish passport control.

No Swedish residence permit even required to be admissible into Sweden via CPH. Merely being admissible into the Schengen area and heading to Sweden from/via CPH has worked this month.

I almost always have some stored Oresundsbro-crossing Skanetrafiken tickets on my phones.

GUWonder

On November 25th, the reported annual Swedish death toll for Covid-19 was 6,555 people.
On November 24th, the reported annual Swedish death toll for Covid-19 was 6,500 people.
On November 20th, the reported annual Swedish death toll for Covid-19 was 6,406 people.
On November 19th, the reported annual Swedish death toll for Covid-19 was 6,340 people.
On November 18th, the reported annual Swedish death toll for Covid-19 was 6,321 people.

This past weekend, the Swedish PM did another one of his evening "fireside chat" type televised things on national TV. This is like his second for the year, and like only the fourth or fifth by a Swedish PM during the past 25+ years. Both of these from him are about Covid-19.

Sweden racked up 200+ deaths for this in just about a week's time while Denmark's annual total of deaths for this is around 800. Denmark's population is about 56% of Sweden's population. But there is no good way of getting around the reality that the Swedish death counts for this are materially worse than Denmark's, both on an annual basis per capita and also on the most recent periodical basis per capita.

Mask use in Sweden this week seems to be lower in public than it was at this time last week, and it was very low already then. I'm still waiting to get some numbers to indicate what happened to retail shopping and F&B venues activity this month in Sweden and in Denmark.

Swedish passport control for train passengers coming in from Denmark has pretty much disappeared in recent weeks (even more than it's already very low levels of frequency during this fall).

CPH-Flyer

I can't really say that I am surprised by the reaction and the attitude of most people in Sweden by now.

For a long period they have been told that after the spring with the "somewhat bad numbers", Sweden was in the ideal position to weather the second wave. All other countries would basically be much much worse of than Sweden, and in the end be same or worse than Sweden.. And initially it could also look like that was about to happen as the second wave came later to Sweden than most European countries. Causing Tegnell with the Swedish media in tow to take victory laps extolling the virtues of the Swedish approach.

When the signs was obvious that the second wave was coming in Sweden, there were no backtracking. Even now, with the epidemic back in serious strength, Tegnell opens his press briefing with talking about how bad it is in other countries in the world, and how the US is the worst hit country etc. And then by the way, Swedish numbers are like this. While comments and Q&A follow, unless you really watch until pretty far in, your impressions will be that Sweden is not doing too bad. There is not an elephant in the room, there is a herd of elephants, the size of which would make Botswana envious, in the room. Yet we should not talk about it.

And that brings us to the current mask usage levels....
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