The cabinet will meet today to discuss the dire corona figures. New measures are in the air, the press conference will probably be brought forward.
Now that the corona figures are exploding, insiders are taking extra restrictions into account. As of today, the 1.5 meter obligation applies again, but the reintroduction of lockdown-like measures also seems close. ‘Everything is on the table’, says an insider.
The cabinet still hopes to see a ‘kink’ in the infection graph this week, but it is not yet detectable. With more than 23,000 new infections on Tuesday, an average of almost 40 IC admissions per day and almost 250 new patients in the nursing wards, all signals are on the red.
The cabinet actually wanted to wait ‘until Friday, perhaps even the weekend’ to take stock, said Minister Hugo de Jonge (Public Health) earlier this week. But that seems too far in the future. The press conference scheduled for Friday, December 3, will most likely be brought forward, perhaps even to next Friday.
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But, a source says, first there must be clarity about what the experts are saying. ,,First we need to hear the state of affairs today from OMT chairman Jaap van Dissel. And then the timetable can go into effect, with an OMT meeting, a Catshuis session and a press conference. But the dates are not fixed.”
A member of the OMT states that ‘a small miracle’ must happen if additional interventions are to prove unnecessary. ,,It is possible, there can be a change, behavior is everything. But of course it looks very bad now.”
The government is now grappling with the question of what to do. With the enormous virus wave, closing sectors such as the catering industry or retail, visiting bans and perhaps even closing schools seem effective, but the question is whether there is sufficient support for it. In addition, the virus is now spreading rapidly among primary school students and their parents, but the OMT and politicians have previously declared a school closure taboo. An initiate from The Hague now reports about this: “Everything is on the table.”
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Last night, Diederik Gommers of the Dutch Association for Intensive Care suggested that we intervene quickly and ‘hard’. He also considers the closure of schools necessary. Otherwise, says Gommers, ‘code black’ will be in effect in the ICUs in ten days, with hospitals having to decide who can still help and who cannot.
Minister De Jonge immediately contradicted this. He states that ‘we are still very far’ from code black. Ernst Kuipers, chairman of the National Network Acute Care (LNAZ), also said that he did not expect this black scenario to occur in the coming days or weeks.
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