The word has fallen: lockdown. After the Council of Ministers, outgoing Hugo de Jonge (Public Health, CDA) did not rule out the possibility that it will come this winter (“We will do everything necessary to relieve care”) and where OMT chairman Jaap van Dissel said three weeks ago that lockdowns next winter are “not real”, he has also become more cautious. “We think and hope that it is not necessary”, he said to the NOS.
This new wariness is not surprising for those who take a look at the numbers. The number of reported positive tests went well beyond the peak of the wave in July last Saturday, when the number of infections rose rapidly and at the peak more than 11,000 positive tests were received at RIVM. On Saturday there were even 12,207 positive tests reported (Sunday 11,398), only in December last year there were more. Pressure is also mounting in hospitals: the number of corona patients in hospital has doubled in two weeks. There are now almost 1,500 corona patients in hospital, 300 of whom are in the ICU.
No flattening yet
The growth in both the number of positive tests and hospital admissions is not yet leveling off. RIVM previously estimated that tens of thousands of people could still end up in hospital, several thousand of them in ICUs. Not enough people have built up an immune system yet, according to the RIVM, and there is also a large group of people for whom the vaccine does not work.
This would mean that the corona wave could continue to grow, despite a vaccination rate of about 87 percent among the adult population. If the extra measures that went into effect this weekend work, the peak will probably only be reached in two weeks. Based on the current growth, this would mean that there are twice as many corona patients in hospital.
The cabinet considers it possible that the measures will not have sufficient effect: on Tuesday it already said that new measures will probably be announced next Friday. The government will hope that the measures announced by then will be enough. And then it will probably take another week for the peak to reach its peak: in late November, early December – assuming the coronavirus will hit the wall of immunity at some point.
The latest model calculations contain a scenario in which the latter happens, RIVM modeler told NOS. But there are also scenarios in which a higher peak is possible. This raises the question: shouldn’t the government have intervened more quickly? Van Dissel suggested that this should indeed have happened: “there is a gray area”; a moment when you have to intervene, he said, “when you can say afterwards that you could have done something sooner”.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC in the morning of November 8, 2021
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