At the moment, 84.1 percent of the Dutch population over the age of 18 has been fully vaccinated, the government website reports. Vaccination is the most important step towards a society without corona rules. But whether such a vaccine will solve everything? “I don’t think the problem will disappear completely with vaccines,” says Alma Tostmann, epidemiologist at Radboudumc.
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Issues
The vaccine does work ‘extremely well’ against hospital admissions. “Although a vaccine does not completely exclude that you still become so ill that you are admitted,” Tostmann told EditieNL. Although the percentage of vaccinated people who still end up in hospital is small, it is still a large number of people in the population as a whole. “That does cause problems, especially because a significant part of the population is not vaccinated.”
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Vaccination coverage is of great importance to prevent hospital admissions and to burden healthcare as little as possible. “These last percentages of the vaccination rate really matter, it concerns percentages of the entire population,” says the epidemiologist. “A few percent may sound like little, but it has a big impact on the burden on hospitals.”
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Freedom
Although a higher vaccination rate would help to limit the pressure on healthcare, the number of vaccinations has stagnated, data analyst Yorick Bleijenberg says. “Most people have already been vaccinated. You now clearly see that unvaccinated people really need to be convinced on a person-by-person basis.” And perhaps vaccinated people will also have to be convinced in the future, namely to get a third shot. “You see that the effectiveness of the vaccinations is declining, so it makes sense to take a third shot.”
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To be able to really fight corona well, the effectiveness of the vaccine must be 100%. At the moment the jab is mainly effective in preventing a serious disease course, but not in stopping the spread. “But a jab gives you much more freedom of movement,” says epidemiologist Tostmann. “The more people that are vaccinated, the more freedom we have.”
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