Falling numbers and yet threatening language. Outgoing Prime Minister Mark Rutte (VVD) would have preferred a “glad tidings” in the last press conference before Christmas, but he had to announce on Tuesday that the evening lockdown will be extended by at least four weeks, primary schools must close a week earlier and may threaten more measures. . The reason is the ‘great concerns’ that the cabinet has about the Omikron variant, which is on the rise in Europe.
There were bright spots in the weekly figures of the RIVM on Tuesday: the number of infections and new hospital admissions is falling. “But just as we are starting to get Delta under our thumb, Omikron is looming,” said corona minister Hugo de Jonge (CDA).
Omikron is spreading rapidly across the border. The variant is expected to become dominant in Denmark and parts of England in the coming days. In Belgium, Omikron is expected to dominate before the end of the year.
It is unclear how fast the variant is growing in the Netherlands. Omikron was already found in eighty travelers from southern Africa, but only appeared three times in the so-called germ surveillance, a sample of the RIVM in which it is recorded which variants occur in the Netherlands.
GGD Amsterdam sees the variant spreading quickly. In its own sample with the AMC of 200 positive tests per day, the percentage of positive tests grew from 1.2 percent on December 5 to 3.7 percent on December 12. That doesn’t seem like much, but at this rate of growth it goes fast: in the most pessimistic scenario, Omikron will be dominant in Amsterdam in two weeks, in the most optimistic in the first half of January.
Rutte explicitly mentioned Omikron to legitimize the school closure. This is “disastrous” for children and families, but according to the prime minister also “really necessary” to slow down the spread of the new variant. This choice is a striking turnaround for the cabinet. Weeks ago, the Outbreak Management Team (OMT) suggested extending the Christmas holidays, in order to reduce the chance that school-age children would infect their grandparents during Christmas. The government always rejected this because it could lead to additional learning disadvantages. Keeping the schools open “is and remains our commitment,” Education Minister Arie Slob (ChristenUnie) tweeted on Thursday.
In recent days, the OMT had again “urgently” advised a closure because of Omikron, Rutte said. Insiders say that Rutte and De Jonge faced Slob. The education minister lost the discussion in the cabinet and spoke of “heavy decision-making” on Tuesday.
De Jonge expects the Omikron variant to cause a new wave “during January”. The OMT will assess the situation again on Friday, says OMT member Marc Bonten: “English data now shows that Omikron is spreading twice as fast within households as the Delta variant. But we don’t know about hospital admissions yet, we expect more clarity about this this week.”
Dilemma
According to De Jonge, it is conceivable that the OMT will recommend additional measures. Professor of infection prevention and OMT member Andreas Voss (Radboud University) says the uncertainty surrounding Omikron poses a dilemma. “If you wait with measures until you know everything for sure, you will fall behind the facts. The chance that Omikron will also take over here is huge, we really have to make sure that things don’t go very fast.”
The starting position of the Netherlands is not good. The current wave is already very high, the number of urgent operations that are postponed, for example for cancer or heart disease, is still increasing.
Another way to dampen an Omikron wave is to speed up the booster campaign. De Jonge expressed the ambition on Tuesday that every adult Dutch person can already be boosted by the end of January, instead of the earlier goal of mid-March. A lot still needs to be arranged for this ‘insane effort’, the minister acknowledged, but he ‘hopes it will work out’.
Parents annoyed page 3
A version of this article also appeared in NRC in the morning of December 15, 2021
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