The Netherlands is going back to an expanded variant of the ‘evening lockdown’: everything open until 10 p.m. As a result, the corona admission ticket will also return to everyday life in many places. But how effective is the 3G policy, now that Omikron is rampaging through the country?
Relaxing now that the infections are “towering” is a risk, Prime Minister Mark Rutte (VVD) acknowledged during the press conference on Tuesday evening. The partial reopening will therefore be accompanied by additional measures in the catering, culture and sports sector on the advice of the Outbreak Management Team (OMT) for the time being. In addition to the corona tickets: keep your distance, wear mouth caps during movements and fixed seats.
But in contrast to the measures taken in November, it is now not Delta, but the Omikron variant that is dominant. It is more contagious and causes more infections, even among vaccinated people. Due to the relaxation, the number of infections will rise even further, expects Minister Ernst Kuipers (Public Health, D66).
‘Muffler effect’
The corona tickets alone cannot reverse the Omikron wave. A study last week by, among others, UMC Utrecht and TU Delft showed that even stricter access rules than 3G do not sufficiently reduce the reproduction number.
Omikron also affects the effectiveness of the admission tickets: the current 3G policy – access with a vaccination, recovery or test certificate – prevents fewer hospital admissions and infections due to the new variant. That was 13 percent, now 8 percent. 2G – access only for vaccinated and cured persons – is somewhat more effective, but that measure has not yet been adopted by the House of Representatives. 1G – every available test – prevents many more infections, but that requires a lot of testing capacity; up to 4.4 million tests per day, Kuipers said.
“100 percent certainty means that events and other matters have to be closed and that is not what we want,” said Kuipers on Tuesday evening. The corona ticket is not a panacea that prevents all infections, he emphasized, but should reduce the risks of contamination and hospital admissions. The fact that the effect of the admission ticket is smaller does not mean, in his view, that there is no effect. Kuipers spoke of ‘a dampening effect’ that can be the difference between ‘an increase and a constant level of the number of infections’.
The OMT believes that the admission tickets should also be seen in the light of all other measures, “in which each measure in itself may not have a very great effect, but taken together as a bundle it does.”
Epidemiologist Alma Tostmann (Radboud UMC) wonders what Omikron has left of the added value of the corona admission ticket. In that bundle of measures – sometimes visualized as a stack of slices of Swiss cheese with holes that cover each other’s holes – the corona ticket is “a transparent thin slice”, she says. “In places such as theaters or museums, you can expect less spread thanks to other measures. The corona ticket has little added value there. In places where it is busier and mouth caps go off more often, with this variant – with the current level of contamination – regular self-testing is much more useful than the corona admission ticket.”
Tostmann recalls that the discussion about the effectiveness of the corona ticket actually predates Omikron. Last summer, the reopening of the night catering industry led to a significant wave of contamination, mainly among young people, despite the admission tickets. “The corona tickets actually only work well if you adhere to the basic rules and have yourself tested in the event of complaints and act honestly. If you don’t do that, you can still infect people as a vaccinated person with complaints.”
Infectious disease modeler (Wageningen University & Research) and former Red Team member Marino van Zelst also think that the corona ticket makes more sense in certain circumstances than in others. Testing every discotheque visitor makes more sense than every eater in a quiet lunchroom. “The report by UMC Utrecht and TU Delft showed that the corona tickets help somewhat to inhibit infections, compared to situations in which you would not use it. Whether that profit is proportional is a political question.”
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Control, and enforcement of that control by municipalities, determine how well the corona tickets work. Kuipers and Rutte appealed to their own responsibility on Tuesday evening. “It is up to all of us that we can still look ahead in three weeks,” said Rutte.
“It is important to know how strong the compliance is: do all catering establishments comply with this?” says Quirine ten Bosch, researcher of the epidemiology of infectious diseases at Wageningen University. Otherwise, this will lead to ‘clustering’ of unvaccinated people in cafes that do not monitor. “The effectiveness of an admission ticket depends on, for example, the vaccination rate and the spread of the virus. You can’t just say: 3G works or not.”
A version of this article also appeared in NRC on the morning of January 26, 2022
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