The outbreak of the coronavirus has forced people around the world to change their routines and get used to spending more time than usual confined to their homes. The contestants on Sweden’s version of Big Brother, though, have been adjusting to this for weeks.

When Daniel Glasman entered the Big Brother house in early February, there had been only a handful of confirmed cases of Covid-19 across Europe and no one on the continent had died with the illness. Fifty days later, when he returned to his home in Stockholm, he could not have been prepared for what awaited him.

“I don’t want to exaggerate or anything, but I’ve just gone through a really profound experience inside the house and then I come out and find the world has changed in a completely different direction,” Glasman says.

“It’s like when you were a kid and you were supposed to learn how to ride a bike for the first time, which is difficult enough, and then at this point I’m having to learn how to ride my bicycle while being drunk at the same time.”

Sweden’s approach to the pandemic has been slightly different from most other European countries. At the time of writing, borders have not been closed, unlike in neighbouring Denmark and Norway, and those who have left the Big Brother house have been able to visit restaurants and see friends. That is not to say nothing has changed, though: nightclubs and cinemas have closed, while many other venues have opted to close voluntarily.

Glasman was taken to dinner by friends upon leaving the house and has been able to spend some of his free-ish time getting back to relative normality, although some adjustment has been required. Some of his friends are out of work due to restaurant closures, while Djurgårdens, the football team he supports, have been forced to postpone the defence of their league title – the new season, which was supposed to begin in April, has been put on hold until June at the earliest.

The Big Brother housemates were given some information about the pandemic during the show – breaking from the usual rule of no contact with the outside world – and similar approaches were taken on Big Brother broadcasts in other countries, including Germany and Canada. However, there is only so much you can do to prepare yourself for an unprecedented situation.

“Even though the situation was very dire and everything had changed from when I went into the house, I was able to start mentally processing that and begin my journey back into the real world just by knowing what the situation was like,” Glasman says.

“I was shocked and positively surprised at the same time, because I’d imagined the opening scene from 28 Days Later, but there’s still people out there and life goes on. I was still shocked by the scale of it all, and I still think I’m processing it, because I’m still getting used to it and I’m not at all up to speed on the global situation. I need to take it step by step.”

Glasman estimates that he has spent between four and six hours every day responding to fans of the show on social media. He wonders whether this serves a useful purpose, in giving people escapism from the drip-feed of news coverage.

“The outpouring of support has been an immense factor in me feeling so well coming into a world that’s completely different in every way – that’s just made the process so much easier for me,” he says.

“We’re going through the most dramatic situation of our generation. We’ve never seen a proper war [on home soil], we’ve never seen a proper crisis, we’ve never seen anything on the scale or magnitude of this pandemic.

“People’s minds have been preoccupied elsewhere, but on the other hand they have all this time on their hands in quarantine and sometimes it’s good to not have 24-hour access to the news. You want to relax your mind, or do something different, and I’m sure it’s had an effect on the viewership of Big Brother as well.”

While it is hard to predict the level of attention any Big Brother contestant will receive when leaving the show, he has done a number of TV and radio spots, even if there have been more video calls than he anticipated … and less hugging.

Elements of the Big Brother experience are now much more relatable to the general population, only not in the way the contestants will have expected when entering the house back in February.

“I think the corona situation has put a lot of focus on just the isolation part of it,” says Glasman, adding that he is being forced to adapt to changes in his own life, the lives of his friends and the world at large.

“Obviously, that’s put a magnifying glass to the situation we were in when we were inside – if the world hadn’t changed, it would still be a pretty moving experience being locked away from it for so long, but when you add the fact that we’re going through the largest human and global change in a lifetime, that makes the transition back into real life immensely different and immensely harder.”