The National Institute for Health and Welfare (THL) has tightened its travel and quarantine guidelines.
Mika Salminen, the agency's director of health security, says it has become clear that despite the recommendations, people have been travelling to areas where the pandemic situation is significantly worse than in Finland and ignored the quarantine guidelines.
"We have now had to tighten the quarantine rules to specify that when returning from a restricted-travel country, one must stay entirely at home and arrange this with one's employer," he says.
"The most important change is the recommendation regarding children, which is that they should not go to school, preschool or daycare, if they have been to restricted-travel country," Salminen explains, adding that in primary education, special teaching arrangements must be made for quarantine cases.
Salminen stresses that people should think carefully about whether travel abroad is absolutely essential this year.
The government has stated that leisure travel is not recommended except to those countries for which Finland has lifted travel restrictions.
Finnish citizens may however return home from any country.
"But you must be prepared to pay the price of returning to Finland from a second home, for instance," says Salminen.
Official quarantine orders possible
Salminen points out that if municipal health authorities suspect that people are not following instructions, they may be placed under official quarantine orders.
"This has happened in Turku, for instance," he says. "This can be imposed if someone arriving in the country does not want to take a coronavirus test or if there is a suspicion that he or she is not adhering to the quarantine rules."
According to Salminen, officials are considering various alternatives for tracking such compliance.
"Our hope is however that people will take these recommendations seriously because the alternative is that the pandemic will accelerate and we will again face various societal restrictions."
Salminen says that some have tried to get around the quarantine rules by pointing out that they have changed planes in a country without travel restrictions.
100% compliance from passengers from North Macedonia
A free testing point was set up at Helsinki Airport last week, but so far its use has been voluntary.
On Friday all passengers on a flight arriving at the airport from Romania were asked to take tests, but only about two thirds of them did so, some saying that they had just been tested within the previous few days.
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On Saturday evening the same procedure was imposed on passengers arriving in Turku from Skopje, North Macedonia, but this time all 150 passengers agreed to undergo testing.
Laura Saurama, director of economy and administration at the City of Turku's welfare division, says that passengers were told that if they did not agree to a test, they would be placed under monitored quarantine.
The THL says that a significant proportion of recent infections have come in from the Balkan countries.
Neighbouring Norway meanwhile on Friday asked its citizens to avoid all foreign travel. Salminen says that the Finnish government is continually considering possible changes to travel restrictions. As of Monday, internal borders will be reinstated for Belgium, Netherlands and Andorra.
"In any case one should consider whether leisure travel is essential this year," Salminen says.
Citizens, their families and permanent residents always allowed to enter
According to the THL, Finnish citizens always have the constitutional right to return to Finland, and to leave the country unless the right has been restricted by law. Finnish citizens' family members may also enter the country regardless of their nationality."
The Border Guard notes that the same applies to citizens of EU and Schengen countries who are resident in Finland, and their family members, as well as third-country nationals who hold Finnish residence permits.
The travel restrictions imposed (and lifted) by the Finnish government are listed here.
The cabinet said on Thursday that it is closely tracking the situation in Germany and Denmark where "the number of incidences is likely to have increased momentarily due to local clusters of the disease," adding that "the situation must be reassessed if the incidence rate clearly exceeds the limit value, as is now the case in the Netherlands and Belgium".
There are no restrictions on pleasure boat traffic from other Schengen countries. In Finland's vicinity, that includes all the countries around the Baltic Sea besides Russia, as well as Norway and Iceland.
