DENMARK announced today it would close cinemas, theatres and concert halls and restrict restaurant opening hours over a record number of daily Covid-19 cases, accelerated by the Omicron variant.

“Theatres, cinemas and concert halls, they will have to close,” Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen told a press conference.

“We need to limit our activity. We all need to limit our social contacts.”

The Scandinavian country recorded a new all-time high of more than 11,000 cases in the past 24 hours, Frederiksen said.

Denmark, which sequences more samples than many other countries, is one of the countries in the world with the highest numbers of confirmed Omicron cases. More than 2,500 cases of the reportedly more transmissible variant have been recorded in the last 24 hours.

Restaurants and nightclubs will need to close at 11pm, instead of the current limit of midnight, and alcohol sales will be banned after 10pm.

The measures announced today still need to be approved by parliament.

Unlike during earlier virus waves, Frederiksen said the government still planned to reopen schools after the holidays, even though the Christmas vacation has already been extended to counter the surge.

“Our aim is still to keep society as open as possible,” she said, adding that more restrictive measures introduced in the spring of 2020 could be avoided “because we have vaccines”. – AFP, December 17, 2021.