RIVM was surprised by the rapid corona outbreak in the Netherlands, as were experts in other countries. “Actually, all of Europe was surprised by what happened,” said Aura Timen in the NOS Radio 1 News.
Timen is head of the National Coordination Center for Infectious Disease Control at RIVM and a member of the Outbreak Management Team. She says she only realized how serious the corona epidemic could get when things went wrong in Italian hospitals. “That made us think that we could also have gigantic problems in the Netherlands. Italy was an eye opener.”
In the southern European country, the outbreak was first under the radar. The Dutch went on a winter sports holiday and once back they celebrated carnival. “An unfortunate circumstance.” In NRC Timen says she may have been overconfident by saying that the risks were not too bad on 21 February, when there were a few groups of infections in Europe.
The infection fighter says that RIVM has closely followed the outbreak in China from the start, but that China seemed able to curb the outbreak. No one of the people who returned from China and were tested was positive.
Correspondent Sjoerd den Daas has a comment on this. He says that travelers returning from areas other than Wuhan, where the outbreak started, were not tested in the Netherlands because they did not meet applicable testing criteria at the time.
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