“We are ready to face the coronavirus”

According to an investigation by our colleagues from Nieuwsblad, the office of Minister of Public Health Maggie De Block has repeatedly ignored the warnings of experts. The latter were already alerting the authorities to the seriousness of the health crisis three weeks before confinement, via internal notes.

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For a year, Belgium has been facing the coronavirus epidemic. In March 2020, after several weeks of observing the evolution of the virus in China, our country also found itself confined in the hope of limiting the spread of this new, still mysterious disease.

If the drastic measures were taken in mid-March, the experts had already alerted the authorities since the end of February 2020 on the danger posed by this crisis. But according to a long survey by our colleagues from Newspaper, the Minister of Health Maggie De Block would have ignored on several occasions the recommendations of the experts, trying on the contrary to reassure the population.

On February 22, 2020, a report from the Scientific Committee already shows the concern of experts. As our colleagues explain, the report of three contains no less than 23 question marks and 5 exclamation points. “An unprecedented fact for the calm Steven Van Gucht who wrote the report”. It would have reached internally in the office of the Minister of Health. But two days after receiving this report, Maggie De Block is still reassuring in the columns of Tijd. The minister explained that “it is not such an aggressive virus”, calling it “an ordinary flu virus” and that it would be necessary “to sneeze in someone’s face to transmit it”.

According to Newspaper, many internal notes from experts have tried to warn the office of the Minister of Health and the public authorities, well before the first measures. But they would have “hit a wall”.

The daily thus reports a series of notes and recommendations from experts which the authorities seem to have ignored. Two days after the first opinion of the Scientific Committee, the group of experts would have once again sounded the alarm. In a new report, they reiterate the “need to create a mobile team to be able to test an increasing number of people in the near future”. A week later, Maggie De Block assures us that the large-scale tests “don’t make sense”, “it’s very intensive and scientifically completely false”.

“I was disturbed by the minister’s announcements when she said on television: we are ready to face the virus”, had also declared Erika Vlieghe during the Special Covid Parliamentary Committee. “We weren’t ready at all.”

The Nieuwsblad explains that the Risk Management Group was already recommending “a preparatory plan to increase the capacity of hospitals” at a meeting on February 25, 2020. The group also requested the activation of the Crisis Center at the same time. Tensions would thus have emerged between experts and politicians. On March 10, Prime Minister Sophie Wilmès finally decides to convene the National Security Council.

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