Amsterdam and Rotterdam do not warn every contact with a corona patient | Inland

Rotterdam still makes an exception for patients with a high risk. These are people who work in healthcare, or who have attended an event with more than ten visitors, where they could not keep a distance of 1.5 meters from others. After infection, their contacts are still warned. “We focus on risk groups and risky situations. We are using our capacity most effectively with this new method, ”explains Saskia Baas, director of Public Health at the GGD Rotterdam-Rijnmond.

If a contact from a positively tested person receives complaints and is found to be infected, it will still be linked in the system to the infected person. “This allows us to keep an overview of the clusters,” report the health services of Amsterdam and Rotterdam.

The two largest cities do scale up the number of source and contact investigations (BCO) for corona. The team in Amsterdam has expanded to 70 researchers this week. A further 60 employees are currently being trained. The service expects to deploy approximately 150 BCO employees by the end of August. Rotterdam is doubling its team, from over 100 to over 200 people.

“With the expansion, we can carry out more BCOs and give extra attention to risk groups. In addition, we emphasize that it is important that infected people inform their network ”, says an employee of the GGD in Amsterdam.

The reason for this change is the increase in the number of infections and the size of the contact network of infected people. This sometimes amounts to more than fifty people.

In the past two weeks, nearly 1,300 new corona infections have been diagnosed in Rotterdam-Rijnmond. The number of patients in Amsterdam-Amstelland has increased by almost 900 in the last fourteen days.

–