Today in Norway: A roundup of the latest news on Thursday 

Restaurant refuses to pay fine following Covid outbreak 

A restaurant in Ålesund, west Norway, has refused to pay a 75,000 Kroner fine after a large coronavirus outbreak occurred at the restaurant. 

“We choose not to accept the fine because we believe that what the police have found is not a strong enough basis,” Christian Bernhard Olsvik told state broadcaster NRK on behalf of the restaurant. 

More than 200 infections were traced back to the eatery following an outbreak at the restaurant in April. Local police have said that the establishment broke a number of the national infection control rules in action at the time. 

45,000 AstraZeneca vaccine doses binned 

The Norwegian Institute of Public Health has decided it will allow all the doses of the AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine stored across Norway to expire and then be thrown out. 

Around 45,000 doses are in storage across the country, distributed to municipalities while the vaccine was still in use in Norway. 

The AstraZeneca vaccine was put on pause in Norway in March, and then dropped in May, due to reports of severe side effects such as blood clots. 

Eight cases of severe thrombosis were recorded in Norway, four of them fatal.

READ MORE: Norway officially axes AstraZeneca jab and changes vaccine strategy

Local leaders demand more warning of Covid rule changes 

The mayors of several of Norway’s largest municipalities have said they are sick of hearing about new Covid rules for the first time during government press conferences and demand they receive more warning of rule changes and more involvement in the decision. 

Municipal leaders in Oslo, Trondheim, Bærum, Tromsø, Stavanger, Drammen, Ullensaker and Halden penned a letter to the government, newspaper Aftenposten are reporting.

“During the pandemic, the municipalities have experienced only finding out about national rule changes at press conferences, with a short amount of time to implement the changes,” the municipal leaders write in the letter. 

Almost half of Norwegians received a fraudulent message in the past year 

Around 48 percent of people in Norway last year received a fraudulent SMS or email with a link to a website that asked the recipient to provide personal details, a new survey from the Norwegian Center for Information Security has revealed.  

Eight percent of recipients said they provided the personal information that was requested in the messages. 

Those aged between 19 and 29 were most likely to respond to the request for sensitive information, with just under a fifth doing so. 

180 new Covid-19 cases 

On Wednesday, 180 new cases of infection were registered in Norway, a slight increase of two cases on the seven-day average. 

In the Norwegian capital, Oslo, 34 new coronavirus infections were recorded, one more than the seven-day average. 

READ MORE: EXPLAINED: What Oslo’s easing of Covid-19 restrictions means for you

The R-number or reproduction rate in Norway is currently 0.9. This means that every ten people that are infected will, on average, only infect another nine people, indicating that the infection level is declining. 

Total number of Covid-19 cases. Source: NIPH