Prime Minister Mark Rutte and Minister Hugo de Jonge (Public Health) have warned the country several times in recent weeks via press conferences about the increasing number of corona infections. If we are not careful, stricter measures are needed again. But the increasing number of infections is not (yet) reflected in the hospital figures. How did that happen? And can we still expect that?
“The number of hospital admissions is lagging behind the number of infections”, Ernst Kuipers, chairman of the National Acute Care Network, explains once again.
He has told it many times in recent months. There can be a week between the time that someone becomes infected and becomes ill. Then it can also take more than a week before someone is so sick that they need hospital care. And the hospital stay can then last for several weeks.
And so the number of hospital admissions functions as a kind of rear-view mirror, in which you can read how many infections there were three to four weeks ago.
Young people are not easily hospitalized with corona
But there’s more. Half of the positive tests reported by RIVM on Friday are between twenty and forty years old. Another 13 percent is between zero and 20 years old. A large part of the number of new infections therefore occurs in a group that generally does not quickly enter the hospital with corona complaints.
According to Frits Rosendaal, Professor of Clinical Epidemiology at the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC), the chance that a young person will have to be hospitalized because of corona is “at least ten times less”, although it depends on their age how much smaller they are. chance is exact.
Rosendaal adds: “The question is whether the number of admissions will remain low, or only lag behind, namely until the youngsters have infected their parents.”
“If you know how to prevent that, you can have more infections without it leading to hospital admissions,” says Kuipers.
Kuipers, also chairman of the board of Rotterdam’s Erasmus MC, knows from colleagues in Europe that there too the number of hospital admissions is still lagging behind the number of infections there. “We see the same picture in Berlin, Paris and Stockholm.”
Another group is tested for virus
According to Rosendaal, it is also an important difference that a different group is being tested now than in the spring. “In March we only tested people who were seriously ill and actually always had to be admitted. Now people are tested with minor complaints.”
“The figures were not comparable at all, because then we only tested the tip of the iceberg,” said Rosendaal. According to the LUMC professor, that iceberg was about fifty times the size of the tip.
The number of positively tested people per day may be as high as in mid-March, but there is still a big difference between the estimated number of infectious people in March and today. At its peak at the end of March there were an estimated 270,000, now there are over 51,000.
‘Number of infections must decrease’
According to Kuipers, healthcare can still cope well, but the number of infectious people must quickly remain stable or fall. “A constant number of contagious people is easy to deal with. Also in the long term. And if that doesn’t happen, I don’t expect any immediate problems in two or three weeks.”
“We just have to make sure that the number of infectious people does not double every week. Because if that happens, we will only have a few more steps to take in that doubling process before we get back to 250,000. That increase should stop within a few weeks.”
– .
