But once the actual decline has started, it will also continue, thinks Yorick Bleijenberg: “Because we are now vaccinating a lot, and because the weather is getting better.”
Alma Tostmann warns that the effect of vaccination is delayed. “People who are now vaccinated will only have an impact on the hospital figures in a month. It takes a while for antibodies to be produced, then it affects the number of infections and only then on the hospital admissions.”
Long covid
And even if the number of new hospital admissions falls, there are some caveats. Some of the patients on a nursing ward will transfer to the ICU. And a patient is in the IC for an average of three weeks. So even if the number of new admissions decreases, hospital occupancy does not fall sharply right away.
In addition, the easing that took effect on April 28 could again lead to an increase in infections. It is now too early to say anything about that. But because older people are increasingly vaccinated, this will not necessarily lead to more hospital admissions. And then, according to the standards of the cabinet and OMT, further relaxation can be done, which will further increase the number of infections. Only then among the group that has not yet been vaccinated: young people.
Younger people usually do not end up in hospital after an infection, but they can ‘long covid‘ increase. “It is estimated that 10 percent of the people who are infected suffer from long-term consequences of a corona infection,” says Bleijenberg. “But they are not included in the figures for the relaxation policy.”
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