Norway Lifts Coronavirus Restrictions After 561 Days

Norway on Saturday lifted social distancing rules, capacity limits on businesses and other pandemic-era restrictions that have been in place for more than a year.

“It is 561 days since we introduced the toughest measures in Norway in peacetime,” said Erna Solberg, the country’s prime minister, in announcing the moves at a news conference on Friday. “Now the time has come to return to a normal daily life.”

In Norway, new daily cases have dropped by 50 percent over the last two weeks. Sixty-seven percent of the population are fully vaccinated and another 10 percent have had a first dose, according to the Our World in Data project at the University of Oxford.

The changes also allow full capacity at sports and culture venues and restaurants, and the reopening of nightclubs. And the government also said on Friday that it would withdraw at the end of the month its global advisory against nonessential travel abroad.

“We will now go back to assessing countries on an individual basis to determine the need for travel advice,” Ine Eriksen Soreide, the minister of foreign affairs, said in a statement on Friday. “These assessments will incorporate issues relating to the pandemic, the health situation and the security situation in the country in question.”

Entry restrictions will remain in place for some countries, which the government said would be specified before next Friday.

Norway is the latest country in Europe to roll back pandemic-era restrictions. In Sweden, the government confirmed this week that it would proceed with the last stage of its reopening plan for the fully vaccinated, which represents 63 percent of its population.