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Covid tests: Passenger left stranded at Copenhagen Airport after ‘terrible mistake’

A passenger travelling from the UK to China has told The Local how he was left stranded in Copenhagen airport because of confusion around his obligatory Covid-19 tests.

Published: 21 May 2021 18:58 CEST
Updated: 22 May 2021 09:56 CEST

Covid tests: Passenger left stranded at Copenhagen Airport after 'terrible mistake'

A photo of a deserted, late-night Copenhaen Airport, provided to The Local by the passenger in question. Photo: supplied

Stephen Huang, a Chinese national, works as a research analyst for a financial services firm. He has lived in the United Kingdom for 14 years.

Earlier this week, his planned trip to visit his family in China was cancelled after he received conflicting Covid-19 test results during a layover at Copenhagen Airport.

He told The Local he has not seen his wife and two children, one of whom was born in 2020, since October last year.

“I booked my flight in April, paying £1,500 as there are currently no direct flights from the UK to China. The cost was three times the cost during the pre-Covid period. There was no other option as I had to meet my wife and my two kids (aged) five years and ten months,” Stephen told The Local.

The Local has seen copies of Stephen’s boarding cards, stamped negative and positive Covid-19 test results from Copenhagen Airport, and QR code issued by the Chinese Embassy in Copenhagen.

“I arrived at Copenhagen airport on May 18th. The previous day I was required to be tested in London for both PCR and antibody [blood test, ed.], and both results were negative,” he said.

“Once at Copenhagen airport, I was required to be tested again for PCR and antibody, this time with the local institution Airport Doctor, organised by the airline, at a cost of €375. I waited for about 4-5 hours and received my results, both were negative,” he explained.

The certificate, seen by The Local, includes the stamp and signature of Airport Doctor’s testing staff. It shows a negative test result. The Local has also seen the test results from London.

“It was a huge relief and I texted my wife literally saying that ‘nothing can go wrong from here’. About 30 minutes after I sent my results to the Chinese embassy, I received their green QR code which is required to board the flight (to Shanghai),” Stephen said.

“However, not long before departure I was given another set of results and the personnel for Airport Doctor claimed that they made a ‘mistake’ with my previous results and the new certificate is the correct one. In the new certificate, it shows I tested positive for the IgM antibody, this contradicts with their previous certificate and the test result I received in London,” he said.

Stephen said he had “no confidence” in what he was told because “they issued, signed and stamped two certificates with contradictory results.”

By the time it had presented Stephen with the new result, the Covid-19 test service provider had already contacted the Chinese embassy to withdraw his green QR code, required to board the ongoing flight to Shanghai, he said.

“This is obviously devastating as it means I can no longer board the flight and months of preparation is gone,” he explained.

“I (then) received a call from the Chinese Embassy in Denmark explaining that they did not understand what had happened and suggested that I ask Airport Doctor to run another antibody test. They could re-issue a green QR code if the results (were) negative,” he continued.

This transpired to be impossible because Airport Doctor personnel were no longer to be found at their stations, ostensibly having left work.

Stephen said he had been poorly treated by both the testing firm and the airline, adding he had filed complaints with both. He also told The Local that, after contacting Airport Doctor, the company contacted him and apologised for issuing two certificates. It put this down to a “clerk error”. The Local has seen a copy of the correspondence.

Airport Doctor also told Stephen that its chief doctor has spoken to SAS and the Chinese Embassy in Copenhagen about the matter. It also wrote that its tests suggested he has been vaccinated against Covid-19. Stephen has not received the Covid-19 vaccine, however.

The Local has contacted Airport Doctor to request comment.

A spokesperson with SAS said the company sympathised over the situation and noted it does not have a preferred partner for coronavirus testing at Copenhagen Airport.

“We don’t have a preferred partner for Covid tests and the tests that passengers (take) are a contract between the passenger and the service provider,” Alexandra Lindgren Kaoukji, acting head of media relations for SAS in Denmark, told The Local.

Airport Doctor is the only test provider approved by the Chinese Embassy for tests valid for travel to China, Lindgren Kaoukji said.

“This scenario is of course very unfortunate circumstances for the passenger. It’s challenging times we are in with the pandemic still ongoing but we try to constantly develop solutions making it easier for our passengers to travel,” she added.

Stephen called the conduct of Airport Doctor and SAS “highly unprofessional and irresponsible.”

“After making the terrible mistake of giving me two certificates, (they) clearly did not provide a convincing explanation and wasted valuable time” when another test could have been arranged, he said.

“I do not understand how the validity of an issued, signed and stamped certificate can be omitted by mere words,” Stephen added.

“The airline offered no help regarding my situation. As a result, I was left alone at the airport with no access to food nor accommodation. I could not leave the terminal as I had no Schengen visa. Luckily, I managed to book another flight back to London, paying another £475. I will be required to self-quarantine for another 10 days after arriving in the UK, which further delays my plan of going back to China,” he said.

Stephen estimated that, given the expected costs of booking a new trip, additional testing and the flight back to London, the episode could leave him with an overall bill of as much as £10,000.

Editor’s note: At the request of Stephen, we have not used his real name but a nickname. Stephen’s identity is known to The Local.

Member comments

Geordieman - 23 May 2021 at 05:36 CEST

Feel so sorry for this person. Rapid tests such as the ones done at airports are not as accurate as tests which are done in the laboratory, so he more than likely had a false positive.
As for the company packing up and leaving before the flight left is also unfortunate – but the company having realised they made a potential mistake, should have arranged a re-test before ringing the Chinese embassy, perhaps they will put that down to another ‘clerical error’.

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FACT CHECK: Did Sweden have lower pandemic mortality than Denmark and Norway?

At one point in May 2020, Sweden had the highest Covid-19 death rate in the world, spurring newspapers like the New York Times and Time Magazine to present the country as a cautionary tale, a warning of how much more Covid-19 could ravage populations if strict enough measures were not applied.

“Per million people, Sweden has suffered 40 percent more deaths than the United States, 12 times more than Norway, seven times more than Finland and six times more than Denmark,” the New York Times reported in July 2020.

An article in Time in October 2020 declared Sweden’s Covid response “a disaster”, citing figures from Johns Hopkins University ranking Sweden’s per capita death rate as the 12th highest in the world.

So there was undisguised glee among lockdown sceptics when Svenska Dagbladet published its data last week showing that in the pandemic years 2020, 2021 and 2022 Sweden’s excess mortality was the lowest, not only in the European Union, but of all the Nordic countries, beating even global Covid-19 success stories, such as Norway, Denmark and Finland.

Versions of the graph or links to the story were tweeted out by international anti-lockdown figures such as Bjørn Lomborg, a Danish sceptic of climate action, and Fraser Nelson, editor of Britain’s Spectator Magazine, while in Sweden columnists like Dagens Nyheter’s Alex Schulman and Svenska Dagbladet’s opinion editor Peter Wennblad showed that Anders Tegnell, the state epidemiologist who led Sweden’s strategy had been “right all along”.

Excess mortality — the number of people who die in a year compared to the number expected to die based on previous years — is seen by some statisticians as a better measure for comparing countries’ Covid-19 responses, as it is less vulnerable to differences in how Covid-19 deaths are reported.

But are these figures legitimate, where do they come from, and do they show what they purport to show?

Here are the numbers used by SvD in its chart:

Where do the numbers come from?

Örjan Hemström, a statistician specialising in births and deaths at Sweden’s state statistics agency Statistics Sweden (SCB), put together the figures at the request of Svenska Dagbladet.

He told The Local that the numbers published in the newspaper came from him and had not been doctored in any way by the journalists.

He did, however, point out that he had produced an alternative set of figures for the Nordic countries, which the newspaper chose not to use, in which Sweden had exactly the same excess mortality as Denmark and Norway.

“I think they also could have published the computation I did for the Nordic countries of what was expected from the population predictions,” he said of the way SvD had used his numbers. “It takes into consideration trends in mortality by age and sex. The excess deaths were more similar for Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. Almost the same.”

Here are Hemström’s alternative numbers:

Another issue with the analysis is that the SvD graph compares deaths in the pandemic years to deaths over just three years, a mean of 2017-2019, and does not properly take into account Sweden’s longstanding declining mortality trend, or the gently rising mortality trend in some other countries where mortality is creeping upwards due to an ageing population, such as Finland.

“It’s very difficult to compare countries and the longer the pandemic goes on for the harder it is, because you need a proper baseline, and that baseline depends on what happened before,” Karin Modig, an epidemiologist at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute whose research focuses on ageing populations, told The Local.

“As soon as you compare between countries, it’s more difficult because countries have different trends of mortality, they have different age structures, and in the pandemic they might have had different seasonal variations.”

She described analyses such as Hemström’s as “quite crude”.

In an interview with SvD to accompany the graph, Tegnell also pushed back against giving the numbers too much weight.

“Mortality doesn’t tell the whole story about what effect a pandemic has had on different countries,” he said. “The excess mortality measure has its weaknesses and depends a lot on the demographic structures of countries, but anyway, when it comes to that measure, it looks like Sweden managed to do quite well.”

Do the numbers match those provided by other international experts and media?

Sweden’s excess mortality over the three years of the pandemic is certainly below average worldwide, but it is only in the SvD/SCB figures that it beats Norway and Denmark.

A ranking of excess mortality put together by Our World in Data for the same period as the SvD/SCB table estimates Sweden’s excess mortality between the start of 2020 and the end of 2022 at 5.62 percent, considerably more than the 4.4 percent SvD claims and above that of Norway on 5.08 percent and Denmark on 2.52 percent.

The Economist newspaper also put together an estimate, using their own method based on projected deaths.

Our World in Data uses the estimate produced by Ariel Karlinsky and Dmitry Kobak, who manage the World Mortality Dataset (WMD). To produce the estimate, they fit a regression model for each region using historical deaths data from 2015–2019, so a time period of five years rather than the three used by SCB.

What’s clear, is that, whatever method you use, Sweden is, along with the other Nordic countries, among the countries with the lowest excess mortality over the pandemic.

“Most methods seem to put Sweden and the other Nordic countries among the countries in Europe with the lowest cumulative excess deaths for 2020-2022,” said Preben Aavitsland, the Director for Surveillance and the Norwegian Institute of Public Health.

So if Sweden had similar excess mortality as the other Nordics over the period, does that mean it had a similar Covid-19 death rate?

Not at all. Sweden’s per capita death rate from Covid-19 over the period covered by the SvD/SCB figures, at 2,249 per million people, is more than double Norway’s 959 per million, 60 percent more than the 1,409 per million who died in Denmark, and more than 50 percent more than the 1,612 per million who died in Finland.

While Sweden’s death rate is still far ahead of those of its Nordic neighbours, it is now much closer to theirs than it was at the end of 2020.

“The most striking difference between Sweden and the other Nordic countries is that only Sweden had large excess mortality in 2020 and the winter of 2020-21,” Aavitsland explained. “In 2022, the field levelled out as the other countries also had excess mortality when most of the population was infected by the omicron variant after all measures had been lifted.”

So why, if the Covid-19 death rates are still so different, are the excess mortality rates so similar?

This largely reflects the fact that many of those who died in Sweden in the first year of the pandemic were elderly people in care homes who would have died anyway by the end of 2022.

About 90 percent of Covid-19 deaths were in people above 70, Aavitsland pointed out, adding that this is the same age group where you find around 80 percent of all deaths, regardless of cause, in a Scandinavian country.

“My interpretation is that in the first year of the pandemic, say March 2020 – February 2021, Sweden had several thousand excess deaths among the elderly, including nursing home residents,” he said. “Most of this was caused by Covid-19. In the other [Nordic] countries, more people like these survived, but they died in 2022. The other countries managed to delay some deaths, but now, three years after, we end up at around the same place.”

So does that mean Sweden’s state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell was right all along?

It depends on how you view the shortened lives of the close to ten thousand elderly people who caught Covid-19 and died in Sweden in the first wave because Sweden did not follow the example of Denmark, Norway, and Finland and bring in a short three-week lockdown in March and April 2020.

Tegnell himself probably said it best in the SvD interview.

“You’ve got to remember that a lot of people died in the pandemic, which is of course terrible in many ways, not least for their many loved ones who were affected, so you need to be a bit humble when presented with these kinds of figures.”

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