Wear a mouth cap more often and a more extensive corona admission ticket. Being the two measures which the outgoing cabinet is likely to announce today during a press conference – the first in ages. Broadly speaking, what can we expect from these two measures?
“The cabinet is now opting for a limited number of measures aimed at pushing the increase in admissions down a little bit. That package will not tilt all curves downwards like a sledgehammer,” said epidemiologist Patricia Bruijning (UMC Utrecht). yesterday in the NPO Radio 1 program News & Co.
According to her, the measures will be extended to places where contamination often occurs unnoticed. This can be at the hairdresser’s, but also in the lecture hall. If you introduce measures there, the number of places where you can become infected will logically be smaller. “That will certainly have an effect. But it’s not a very big expansion so you can’t expect a very big effect from it.” As a result, it will probably take a very long time before the number of cases is again at a manageable level for healthcare.
Do people adhere to it?
That is also what Marino van Zelst, infectious disease modeler (Wageningen University Research) thinks. He was a member of the Red Team canceled today, a team of experts that provided the government with unsolicited advice during the corona period. “They aim for exactly proportional enough,” says Van Zelst.
“That strategy is similar to what the cabinet did last October,” he continues. “They put together a package that they assume is just enough to push the number of shots down a bit.” But there is a risk associated with that strategy.
As soon as people do not comply with the new measures, ‘just enough’ is not enough to stop the infections and hospital admissions. Van Zelst: “You can calculate the effects of the measures, but it remains difficult to estimate to what extent people are complying with them.”
“There is no such thing as a table from which you can read which measure has which influence on hospital admissions,” says epidemiologist Alma Tostmann (Radboud UMC). “The OMT can predict roughly what the impact will be, but they also run into uncertainties such as behaviour.”
Minister De Jonge does not want to comment on the measures yet, but it is clear to him that they are inevitable:
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