5 experts warn against new corona wave: ‘Government only acts in a panic’

The number of infections is stable and several people with corona are in hospital, but the pandemic is not over yet. In fact, there will probably be a new corona wave in the autumn. Experts said at a roundtable meeting with lawmakers on Monday that the government was not well prepared for this.

“If a new wave is coming, we don’t know when, it could raise complex questions. Will there be another quarantine?” Tanja van der Lippe, professor of sociology at Utrecht University, is curious.

Van der Lippe wrote the report, which was published in September last year. ‘Navigating and forecasting in uncertain times’, A publication of the Council for Government Policy (WRR) and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW).

“Now it’s time. relatively quiet. Is COVID-19 care a priority or can it no longer be requested from those already on the waiting list?” said Van der Lippe.

According to the scientist, it is important to talk about this now, so that drastic measures can be more easily accepted if they have to be taken.

The WRR/KNAW report presents five scenarios that the government must take into account. It ranges from a “return to normality” to a worst-case scenario, where the pandemic takes more lives every year and continues to spread worldwide, the scientific institutes wrote last fall.

“Our treatments are not flexible enough to accommodate the next wave”

“We are now navigating through the most likely scenario, the so-called ‘flu plus’ scenario,” says VU health economist Xander Koolman. In this scenario, WRR and KNAW assume that the corona is no longer a pandemic with a recurring seasonal recovery.

Koolman: “But even in this scenario, I think we have a chance to go into quarantine because we didn’t do our due diligence to deal with the waves ahead normally.”

Koolman says it is impossible to train many more nurses in a short time, but they can be deployed differently if the situation calls for it. According to the professor, this is especially difficult for the Netherlands.

Koolman describes the Dutch healthcare system as an area with many different healthcare providers. Some are for profit, some are not, but they all have a lot of wiggle room.

According to Koolman, that freedom is only given up when there is panic. “The government appears to be waiting to act until panic sets in again. That’s a shame, because we could have changed that.”

“There is no data to predict”

André Knottnerus, professor of epidemiology and medical statistics at Maastricht University and author of the WRR/KNAW report, emphasizes that it is important to be as well prepared as possible, especially in ‘time of peace’. “We have often experienced where we thought we were awake, but once the virus was gone, it crashed again. Then you are vulnerable as a society.”

Van der Lippe says society itself is ‘impact and resilient’, but there are also groups that are less resilient, as recent years have shown. This was the group that was not only medically frail, but also had little access to socio-economic assistance. “The government has a responsibility to protect them,” said Van der Lippe. They have less authority,” he says.

That is why, in his view, it is important that the government carefully examines the five scenarios. “So we know what to do just in case.”

We don’t know in which direction the virus will go. “There is no data to predict,” Knottnerus says.

RIVM is jealous of Denmark and England

Nevertheless, Susan van den Hof, head of the Center for Epidemiology and Infectious Disease Surveillance at RIVM, said in the same panel discussion that RIVM would like more information to gain insight into the virus and to keep it under control.

He is a bit jealous of his colleagues in Denmark and the United Kingdom, where he believes data sharing is well organised. “That gave them a very good idea of ​​what was going on.”