Supermarkets fear empty shelves due to lost staff, almost a quarter of primary school students are at home, little deferred care can be caught up in healthcare because nurses are in quarantine and waste companies can no longer fill all the schedules.
Omikron saddles the cabinet with a new problem: society is not stuck because of a lockdown, but because hundreds of thousands of people are in quarantine because they have been infected, or because they have been in contact with someone who has tested positive. The call to relax those quarantine rules is getting louder: the GGDs also called on the cabinet last week to at least relax the rules at schools. Now the entire class has to stay at home if there are three or more infections in a class.
Tracking down and isolating potentially infected persons was actually seen as one of the most effective measures to control the corona virus. Whenever rules were released, the cabinet hoped to be able to absorb an increase by more intensive testing and conducting source and contact investigations, in order to stamp out fires. This approach is more or less given up at Omikron: even with strict measures, the number of infections is increasing rapidly.
In healthcare, it is suggested to deploy nurses who are infected but feel fit enough in the corona departments
And that increase in the number of infections is permissible, said OMT chairman Jaap van Dissel in the House of Representatives last week, because Omikron is less pathogenic. He expects that the number of hospital admissions will increase, but that the increase will be manageable. However, some slowing down is necessary, says Van Dissel: many people can still end up in hospital with Omikron. If the number of infections increases too fast, hospitals will not be able to handle the influx, according to the OMT chairman. He also points to other countries, such as France and Denmark, where the number of hospital admissions has risen rapidly in recent weeks.
Stuck society
But Van Dissel also saw that society can come to a standstill with the current infection numbers and quarantine rules. Last week, an average of about 40,000 people a day tested positive, a multiple of the number of positive tests under previous virus variants. On Friday, RIVM reported 57,549 positive corona tests, a record. In principle, all those infected people must be quarantined for seven days – that was about 280,000 people last week. On average, an infected person has had three ‘close’ contacts, who had to quarantine for five days before the relaxation of last week. Under the old rules, nearly 900,000 people would now have to be quarantined.
Also read: Debuting minister Kuipers hopes for ‘calmer’ corona policy
That number has been slightly lower since last week: anyone who has had a booster vaccination does not have to quarantine if he or she has been in contact with an infected person. It is not clear how many people should now be quarantined.
This new rule makes a big difference for adults: roughly half of the adult population has had a booster, so they do not need to be quarantined. But for children that makes no difference. And the RIVM expects that the number of positive tests will increase significantly in the coming period – at the peak, there may be two to three times as many positive tests. Then there would be about 700,000 people in quarantine alone because they are infected – on top of that the close contacts who have not been vaccinated recently.
Crucial professions
The question is how far the cabinet dares to go with easing the quarantine rules. Close contacts no longer in quarantine at all? It makes sense to relax the rules in any case for crucial professions. In healthcare, for example, it is suggested that nurses who are infected but feel fit enough to work should still be deployed in the special corona wards, where already infected patients are located and the risk of infecting ‘normal’ patients is small. That will not be easy for every crucial profession: the police can hardly send an infected local police officer onto the street without there being a great risk of infecting someone. The same applies to the supermarket with stock fillers.
The cabinet seems to find the quarantine rules in education the most crucial. There it may be able to pull out an old protocol: in September, a class no longer went into quarantine with a certain number of infections. Only those in ‘close contact’ with an infected student or teacher had to be quarantined, unless they had recently been vaccinated or cured.
Read also about the situation in education: Thousands of students in quarantine: ‘It’s a madhouse’
The cabinet will make a decision on the quarantine rules on Tuesday.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC Handelsblad on 22 January 2022
A version of this article also appeared in NRC on the morning of January 22, 2022
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