One minute too late: passengers of SAS flight from Nice to Oslo into 10-day quarantine

158 passengers on a flight between Nice, France and Oslo, Norway will have to observe a quarantine of ten days. Reason? On 7 August, their SAS flight SK4700 was scheduled to arrive at Oslo Airport at 00:10 but arrived nine minutes early. Just one minute after Norway switched France to a “red zone”. 

“The change to the red zone was from midnight included, so midnight exactly or one minute past midnight, hence these passengers must go into quarantine“, explained Elisabeth Johansen, an adviser of the Norwegian Ministry of Health to AFP.

Passengers will be able to quarantine at home and should not stay in hotels at the airport, she added.

The authorities took several hours to decide. According to the Norwegian daily Dagbladet, passengers applauded when the pilot told them they had landed at midnight.

On Thursday, Norway announced that it was returning France to the “red zone”, as well as Switzerland, Monaco and the Czech Republic. Due to a resurgence of Covid-19, the four countries have again crossed the threshold of 20 new cases per 100,000 inhabitants over the last 14 days, a level that Oslo has set to establish quarantines.

If it remains at low levels, Norway is also facing a rise in cases, with an incidence rate of 7 new cases per 100,000 in the past two weeks, a tripling, according to data from WHO Europe.