6,000 deaths and almost 12,000 hospital admissions: the corona figures do not lie. But the world looks very different for young people: more than half of those aged between 70 and 79 who were tested positive ended up in hospital. In people between 10 and 40 years old, this was only a few percent.
So if people under 40 get sick, don’t they just contribute to group immunity without having too many problems themselves? According to the RIVM, it is not that simple.
So many people ended up in the hospital after a positive test:
–
–
Wrong picture about group immunity
First, according to a spokesman for RIVM, a wrong image has emerged about group immunity after Rutte dropped it a number of times in his speech in March. “Group immunity is not an end in itself, but simply a well-known fact in infectious diseases. You often achieve this through vaccinations.”
The idea of group immunity is that enough people in the Netherlands are immune to a virus, so that the virus can no longer circulate. This may be because people receive a vaccine (such as measles, mumps and rubella), or because enough people have had the disease.
–
–
And then there is the second problem: we don’t know how long people are immune if they have been sick with the coronavirus. “When you talk about immunity after infection with the coronavirus, we don’t know much about that,” says the spokesperson for RIVM. “You can’t say flatly: if young people get sick, we build up immunity.”
–
–
In addition, it is still questionable whether you as a young person get mild complaints. It is a lot rarer, but of course there are also vulnerable people among young people. “We also know stories of young people who have become very ill or have suffered from the corona virus for a long time.”
–
–
And a final important point, according to the RIVM, is that sick young people can infect the elderly. “They also have parents and grandparents. The virus can spread to an older group,” said the spokesperson. “This week we see an increase in the number of infections in the group of people over 50.”
“As a young person you can think ‘I don’t get so sick, so I don’t care. But we look at population level,’ she continues. “You can infect an older person who can die. So it is important that we all work together to get that virus under control.”
–
–
