The bright spots in the corona wave are becoming slightly brighter: where all figures rose for weeks, a slight decrease has now started, in almost all areas. But that won’t happen very soon.
Take the number of positive tests: that fell by 5 percent in a week, to an average of 21,140 per day. It is unclear whether the actual number of infections is also falling at this rate: the testing capacity of the GGD is too tight, so that not everyone with complaints can easily make an appointment.
Other bright spots are purer in that regard. The number of hospital admissions fell last week, for example, although it was not yet particularly fast. Last week, about 280 new corona patients a day were admitted to the nursing ward, last week there were 300. In the ICU, that number dropped from 48 last week to 41 now.
Ernst Kuipers, chairman of the National Network Acute Care, sees a clear trend: he states that the peak in the number of new admissions is behind us. The trend that can now be seen was also seen in previous peaks, Kuipers stated at a press moment on Monday: growth is slowing down and then turns into a decline. He warned that it will remain busy in the hospitals for a while, especially in the ICUs: corona patients are there for an average of three weeks, so it will take a while before beds will actually become available. Last week, more operating rooms were closed to free up staff for the ICUs.
Where Kuipers already sees a change, RIVM is a lot more careful. “The spread of the virus is decreasing slightly,” the institute notes in a press release, but remains at a high level. Model calculations by the RIVM show that the number of new corona patients could fall further in the coming week, but could also remain at the same level.
Less good view of spread
That is not very easy to calculate: due to the limited testing capacity, there is not enough insight into the virus to make reliable predictions. That view will deteriorate further in the coming period: since last Friday the advice for self-tests has changed, people with complaints may also use them. The number of test appointments at the GGD has decreased since then.
That gives the GGD a little more air, but also saddles RIVM with a problem: how do you keep an eye on a virus when people test themselves? RIVM calls on people who have a positive self-test to go to the GGD to be tested there, in the hope of getting an idea of the scale of the epidemic.
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If the decline continues, it will probably take weeks before the number of corona patients in hospitals has fallen to an acceptable level. According to Kuipers, the number of corona patients who are admitted must fall below twenty per day in order to be able to provide all normal care. How fast that happens depends on the reproduction number, which represents how many people an infected person infects. That is now probably around 1, which means that the number of infections will remain at approximately the same level.
The measures announced by the cabinet at the end of November, including the closure of the catering industry and shops in the evening, should push the reproduction number further down. If the R is around 0.9 – a value that often occurred once the number of infections fell – it takes more than a month for the number of ICU admissions to fall below twenty.
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