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Infected after BBQ, wedding or funeral: ‘Often the 1.5 meters did not work out’

Jaap van Dissel of RIVM said yesterday at his briefing in the House that there are few new infections with corona. This is also reflected in the figures. In recent days, between 60 and 80 people have been tested positive per day. That is less than 1 percent of the more than 10,000 tests that are taken daily.

People who still get infected now usually get the virus at home or in the family sphere, according to the source and contact research by the GGDs. Infections via other family and at work also occur.

“With a ‘normal’ infection you can wait for the immediate housemates to become infected, that is within the family and we do not call it an outbreak,” says Boogmans.

But that changes as soon as you find infections outside the family. “As with family members who do not live in the house, but were together. At a barbecue, a wedding, a party or a funeral. If we can link them together, we will speak of a cluster.”

The five clusters in the Utrecht region can all be traced back to family gatherings. Boogmans cannot say exactly what type of meeting led to the infections, due to privacy.

Don’t give hugs

“We try to find out exactly how the contamination originated. How the cluster started. Often we find that it just failed to stick to one and a half meters. You see that on the street, so it is not surprising. But it remains important not to give hugs even now that the measures are more flexible. “

To find out whether there is a cluster, source and contact researchers from the GGD call everyone who gets a positive test result after a corona test. The contacts are mapped, asking whether there has been close contact with others up to two days before the complaints arose.

Close contact is understood to mean anyone who has been less than five feet from the patient for more than 15 minutes during the contagious period. If that were the case, those contacts should be quarantined for two weeks.

Ringing bells

“The vast majority of people we call with the message that they have to be quarantined understand it,” says Boogmans. “The first reaction of people is sometimes: but I am not sick at all. We tell you that you are not only quarantined for yourself, but also because you can be contagious for others.”

In case of complaints, the contacts must report for a test. If that test proves positive, bells will ring. “If these people were at the same meeting, there probably was a transfer. That’s how we start to visualize a cluster,” says Boogmans.

“Our ultimate goal is to quarantine all close contacts in order to break the chain of infections.”

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