Small increase on intensive cares, but “peak will only come in weeks” Inland

On Tuesday, the number of corona patients in intensive care increased by 15 to 1,424, while the increase was 24 on Monday. Of these, 46 are currently on ICU in Germany, 9 more than Monday. It was also our neighboring country that announced on Tuesday that it would like to supplement the number of Dutch patients in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia to 107. Something that Kuipers is very happy with. “We are very grateful to them.”

He did not want to speak about a target figure for the number of patients to be received in Germany. “It goes without saying that we remain dependent on the wishes of Germany itself.” The available IC capacity in our country is currently 2,400, of which 500 are for non-corona patients. Of the latter group, nearly 400 are on the IC.

New system from now on: no more manual counting

Kuipers and Leerink also announced that an agreement has been reached on a new national platform for care coordination. “This now gives us real-time insight into where IC beds are available without, for example, having to call the hospital separately,” says Kuipers.

The old system did not work properly, Leerink explains. “In it, hospitals had to manually enter how many beds were still available. But that remains human work. It could therefore happen that patients from Brabant were transported to Groningen, for example, where there would be some free IC beds. The situation then changed during the ride, so that the beds turned out to be full on arrival. We can now fix that. ” The system should be operational within a few weeks.

Peak does not come until late April

On Monday, Kuipers and Diederik Gommers, chairman of the Dutch Association for Intensive Care, already announced that they expect the peak in the number of IC patients to be reached at the end of April. It is expected that there will then be just enough capacity, after which the load may remain stable for several months. “That is why nothing should go wrong, it remains fragile,” says Leerink. “We have never had a group of 1400 patients with the same condition on the IC before, this is really a unique situation. And the number of IC patients is increasing, so we still don’t speak of a decrease. ”

Therefore, there is satisfaction with the announced measures by safety regions to close popular routes and places if it is necessary for motorcyclists and cyclists to close this Easter weekend. “That is simply very important, although it is of course not a pleasant measure if you want to get out for a while,” says Kuipers. “But otherwise serious accidents can happen and the question is whether it can be kept a meter and a half away. In both cases there is a risk that the IC will be taxed again more heavily. ”

The experts still emphasize that it is too early to talk about the relaxation of the corona measures. “Then you will get a very fast peak again in no time,” says Kuipers.

101 patients have now left ICU, 21 more than yesterday, and 318 have died.

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