Big Brother contestant says it was a ‘profound experience’ re-entering the outside world amid the coronavirus pandemic

Reality show participants were initially left in the dark about the spread of the illness

Daniel Glasman, a contestant on the Swedish version of Big Brother, has spoken about what it was like to learn of the coronavirus pandemic while on the reality show.

Glasman left the series last week, having spent 50 days inside Sweden’s Big Brother house. When he first joined, Covid-19 had not yet been characterised as a pandemic, and news of the illness had only recently emerged from Wuhan in China.

“I’m digesting the whole thing,” Glasman told The Guardian. “It’s so difficult because I would be in the middle of the process of dealing with being isolated, and I have to deal with the fact that the world has changed while I was gone.

“I can’t turn my back on the world for 50 days and expect the world to keep it together, apparently. I’ve had a very profound experience, but so has the world.”

Revealing how he found out about the seriousness of the pandemic, he said: “A few weeks ago, [producers] started briefing us… they wanted to let us know that all of our love ones and family and friends were safe. They wanted to calm us down.”

The show’s live feed was briefly cut off to allow contestants to ask questions. Glasman said: “There was a fact-centred discussion: a lot of restaurants are closing, we’re stopping huge gatherings of people, sports is stopped, air travel is restricted. Quite a lot of bullet points. We were probably the healthiest people on the planet at the time of being in the house.”

Adding that they did not ask many questions, he said: “With all due respect to my fellow Big Brother participants, it’s not exactly a house full of rocket scientists.”

Contestants on Big Brother series in Germany, Brazil and Canada were also initially left in the dark about the virus.

In a clip that has since gone viral, contestants in the Canada house could be heard wondering aloud why there was no audience to cheer out the first person who was evicted.