Finnish Lapland: How coronavirus has hit Santa’s homeland

While the world celebrates Christmas, the homeland of Santa Claus is preparing its hospitals.

Despite sitting right on the northern edge of Europe, Finnish Lapland has not been spared by the coronavirus pandemic – and health officials worry about a spike in infections from the holidays.

While foreigners have had holiday plans to the region scuppered due to Covid-19, Lapland is preparing for Finnish people to travel north to celebrate Christmas in the real-life winter wonderland.

After all, Rovaniemi - the capital of the province - is the self-proclaimed “Official Hometown of Santa Claus”. 

“We expect 35,000 travellers from all over Finland to come and spend Christmas in Lapland,” Miia Palo, the chief medical officer of Lapland hospital district, tells The Independent.

She adds: “We anticipate that there will be infections and we want to find them.” 

The chief medical officer says people have been asked to take a test, to practice social-distancing, to wear masks and avoid gatherings - however preparations are being made “for more infections than now”. 

“Hospitals and our primary healthcare are preparing," Palo adds. 

Coronavirus has spread in Finland since the first case was detected in late January: a tourist from Wuhan, who was taken to a hospital in Lapland, according to Reuters. 

Since then, the whole country has had more than 34,000 cases confirmed, according to health ministry data. Only around 350 of these have been in Lapland, the sparsely-populated northernmost region.

Recently, Finland responded to news that a mutated version of coronavirus is spreading in the UK by suspending all flights from Britain.

“You know about the mutations,” Palo from Lapland hospital district says. "We think that we might have them here as well." However, Finland does not know for certain yet, she says, as - like other countries in the world - it has not been sequencing the virus as much as the UK. 

To date, western Lapland, which sits next to Sweden, has been the worst-hit in terms of the number of infections, health officials Jyri J Taskila, the pandemic chief at the Western Lapland Healthcare District, and Tea Taskila, the chief medical officer in a town near the Swedish border, jointly tell The Independent. 

“The much worse and serious coronavirus situation in Sweden affects our area, because of the close relationship between the two cities that are located next to the border,” Ms Taskila tells The Independent, referring to Tornio, a city in Lapland, and Haparanda over in Sweden.

“Those two cities have very close relationship, and that they have had for many centuries. It is like the two of them are actually one big city," Ms Taskila, who is the chief medical officer in nearby Kemi, says.

People would cross the border to see family, go to school or work, she says. “It is like the border didn´t exist at all."

But this changed when coronavirus struck earlier this year, and the border was shut.

This was a huge problem for the people in Tornio, Timo Nousiainen, the city’s mayor, tells The Independent, whose lives are split across the border. “We are one society with the people who are living in Sweden side,” he says.

People would even visit the border to speak to their families on the other side of the border, which was shut in April, he says. Restrictions have since eased to allow local people to cross.

Nousiainen says Tornio has “quite a good handle” on the virus now, having done a lot of testing, and tracing the chain of infection in 80 per cent of cases. 

“We haven’t got many people in Lapland so it is quite easy,” he adds.

Several events have been traced back to clusters of cases this autumn – including the downhill skiing world cup – which saw people flock to the same area and visit restaurants – and a hockey game, Palo, Lapland hospital district’s chief medical officer, tells The Independent.

Authorities are worried about Finnish tourists heading to the region for Christmas, she says, they are also worried about what would happen if people did not visit the region, which is reeling from the impact of lost international tourism. “Because that is also a public health matter,” Palo says.

As well as flights from Britain being suspended over the new Covid-19 variant, non-resident foreign nationals are currently barred from entering Finland, although there are some exemptions.

Tui, Britain’s biggest holiday company, also suspended all its trips to Finnish Lapland for this November and December, due to “due to the continued uncertainty surrounding travel and the unprecedented impact of Covid-19”. 

Ida Katajamaa says the Lapland ski resort where she works are not seeing any foreign customers at the moment – who would usually make up 80 per cent of visitors during a normal winter.

“For our resort, it means that we are operating with about half of the staff of normal years. And most likely we're going to have to lay off some people during the low season,” the sales manager at Saariselkä Ski & Sport Resort tells The Independent.

Nina Forsell from the Finnish Lapland Tourist Board says the travel restrictions are “a big challenge” for the winter season – when most customers come from abroad.

However, she is hopeful about the future.

“There is a lot of space around here. It is not a place where people are very crowded,” she says, adding companies have also been adapting to implement coronavirus safety measures. “In that sense, I do think Lapland is a destination that will attract people in the future as well.”

She laughs: “Social distancing is in our nature here.”