RIVM hopes to deal with this in various ways. Not only with the sewer measurements, but also with the use of the Nivel sentinel stations, a network of nearly 140 GPs who send samples every week to see which diseases are circulating. However, hardly any people come there with complaints, so very few samples come in for testing.
Two weeks ago, the weekly yield in the Netherlands was 47 samples, only one of which was corona positive. Too little to keep a close eye on how the coronavirus is going in the Netherlands.
Hospitals find new variants
In the major cities there is a group of researchers who, together with the GGD, have set up a system to quickly detect corona variants. With a special technique, the Amsterdam UMC can analyze the positive tests of the GGD within 24 hours for which variants are going around.
Because especially the elderly and vulnerable are still testing, this alone does not give you a representative sample, admits molecular microbiologist Marcel Jonges. “Fortunately, we also test a lot of our own healthcare staff, young people who are full of life. This allows you to make a prediction about how the virus goes around.”
The samples from the lab of Jonges show that the BA2 omikron variant that is prevalent in the Netherlands now only accounts for 69 percent of all infections in Amsterdam. The variant is increasingly being supplanted by the BA4 and BA5 variants that have crossed over from South Africa. Last week it was 15 percent, this week 17 percent. According to Jonges, this is not a cause for concern, because the variants do not appear to be any more sickening than the original omikron variant.
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