After nearly two years of battling the coronavirus, Armand Girbes thinks it’s time we face the facts: Covid will remain with us for the time being and, like the flu, it will be a nasty disease that we have to live with. We must therefore adjust to the fact that part of the population has to get an injection every year. And also that every year covid patients end up in the ICU and other nursing departments.
That means a permanent extra burden for hospitals. Girbes therefore calls on the cabinet to take action. ‘If you know that, then go organize it, I’d say. All kinds of things happen to us all the time now. We let ourselves be surprised. And that gives the population a lot of mistrust. I think it is important that a number of people outline the perspective: this is how it will look.’
Girbes still advocates covid hospitals and measures to ‘unburden’ healthcare workers – as the boss of Cirque du Soleil does with his circus performers. Instead, he sees with dismay that the best nasal masks for the nursing staff are once again being squabbled; that the necessary auxiliary troops are no longer easily persuaded to assist in the IC; that doctors and nurses themselves become infected and that the formation document that Gert Jan Segers of the ChristenUnie left in the train offers little hope of improvement. ‘And what does the draft coalition agreement say about healthcare? Nothing! Then you think: that can’t be true!’
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