Health Minister Bent Høie said at a briefing on Wednesday that Norway is currently in the third wave of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Høie spoke to the media after a record 1,156 new cases of the virus were registered in the country’s latest daily update. This number is the highest recorded in a day in Norway since the beginning of the pandemic.
It should be noted that in the original wave of spring 2020, the popularity of testing is low. Høie said in the briefing: “We are now setting a record that no one of us wants to set, and we have entered the third wave.”
The more infectious B117 variant of the virus was first discovered in the UK and now dominates in Norway.
According to data from the Norwegian Institute of Public Health (NIPH), B117 currently causes 72% of new infections. In Oslo, this proportion is as high as 82%.