On Sunday, the cabinet met with its advisers in the Catshuis about new measures to contain the virus. A press conference may follow on Monday or Tuesday. Rutte warned on Friday that stricter measures are necessary if the number of corona infections does not decrease. “The next 72 hours are important.” With almost 13 thousand reported infections in two days, three times as many as in the entire month of July, there does not seem to be a break in the trend yet.
This was previously called the weekend of truth, but the RIVM health service expects to see in the figures from Wednesday at the earliest whether the measures taken at the end of September will have an effect. Before someone infected with corona gets a test, and the result is reported by the GGD, it soon takes two weeks.
Visible at the moment: not only is the number of new infections increasing, growth is also accelerating. Almost 39 thousand infections have been reported in the past seven days, 60 percent more than in the previous week. At the beginning of October, this growth rate was still around 40 percent. Until now, the virus has been spreading faster than slower.
The pressure on the cabinet to quickly come up with drastic measures is therefore increasing – although employers are warning of the negative effects of a lockdown. Ernst Kuipers, chairman of the National Acute Care Network, believes that waiting longer is not justified. “This was indeed the weekend of truth.” He agrees that the effects of the measures may not be fully visible until the end of September next week, but the pressure on healthcare is becoming so great that action is needed now.
‘We expect 1,700 covid patients to be admitted within a week, 300 of whom are on the IC. We are already at the point where hospitals across the country have to scale down regular care, even with an optimal spread of patients, ‘says Kuipers. “The time has now come to take additional measures.” He does not want to comment on which measures they should be: ‘That is up to RIVM and the cabinet.’
Care deleted
The number of hospital admissions and deaths is still many times lower than in March and April, but an upward trend can also be seen here. On Sunday afternoon, 1,233 covid patients were in the hospital, doubling in two weeks. In the west of South Holland, 40 percent of regular care is being scrapped to make room for the flow of covid patients, the hospitals in that region announced on Sunday.
Where there was a temporary focus on targeted, regional measures, a national approach will now be chosen again. Last month, the number of infections mainly increased in the large cities in the Randstad. These are still the areas where the most infections are reported, but in all regions the number of new cases is now more than double the signal value of 7 infections per 100 thousand inhabitants per day. Zeeland, the province that has been least affected in this second wave so far, is now at the same level as Amsterdam four weeks ago. Since Saturday, the safety regions of Utrecht, Hollands Midden, Zaanstreek-Waterland and Zuid-Holland Zuid have also been labeled ‘serious’ on the corona dashboard of the central government. This risk level had already been reached in Amsterdam-Amstelland, Rotterdam-Rijnmond and Haaglanden.
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