[D66] How Dutch false sense of security helped coronavirus spread

[A.OUT]

How Dutch false sense of security helped coronavirus spread
By
irishtimes.com
4 min
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The position of Dutch authorities was that only people with symptoms 
could transmit coronavirus. It was repeated by the government, national 
and local health authorities, justifying a cascade of decisions that 
allowed the Netherlands to keep up a “business as usual” attitude even 
as the virus exponentially spread.

The problem was, it was wrong. As early as February 21st, Chinese 
doctors published a case of apparent asymptomatic transmission; German 
doctors wrote to the New England Journal of Medicine on March 5th to 
warn of a case near Munich. The World Health Organisation advises 
transmission without symptoms is possible.

Despite this the Dutch government and health authorities stuck to looser 
quarantine advice than other European countries up to the time of 
publishing, telling people who had travelled from China, outbreak spots 
in Italy, and Iran, that they need only self-quarantine if experiencing 
symptoms.

As well as being underpinned by a flawed assumption, the advice relies 
on people knowing whether they have symptoms or not. This is 
questionable: Chris Higgins, a GP in Australia, provoked an outcry after 
treating 70 patients while he had what he thought was the tail end of a 
mild cold, before he tested positive for Covid-19.

It’s also in stark contrast to the approach in the countries most 
successful at containing the virus, such as Taiwan and Singapore, where 
authorities drew on their experience of the Sars outbreak to implement 
strict travel checks and preventative quarantine before even registering 
a first confirmed case.
Individual freedoms

The case of the Netherlands shows how a flawed belief about transmission 
filtered down throughout society, enabling the virus to spread. It also 
makes for a grand experiment in what happens when a country takes a 
relaxed approach to the virus, placing the maintenance of normality, 
personal responsibility and individual freedoms first.

The first coronavirus diagnosis in the Netherlands was on February 27th. 
As authorities traced his contacts, they found he had attended Carnival 
in the city of Tilburg in the North Brabant region on February 
21st-25th. “The patient was not contagious in the days he celebrated the 
carnival,” the mayor of Tilburg Theo Weterings told media.

In the following days, two more people who were at Tilburg carnival were 
diagnosed with coronavirus. One of them was a worker at Bannink 
Packaging in Drenthe in the northern Netherlands. His partner was also 
infected.

Bannink Packaging continued to operate as normal, saying the employee 
was not sick when he came to work. “The chance that he has infected 
colleagues is therefore rather small,” the spokesperson told media.

On March 4th, another Bannink Packaging employee – who commuted from 
Germany – was diagnosed with coronavirus.

“In Germany they are a lot stricter with testing . . . We should not 
exaggerate. Production continues as normal. In that respect, it is 
business as usual,” a company representative told media. “We advise our 
employees to stay at home if they have symptoms. We cannot do more.”

On March 5th a third employee was diagnosed as positive.

On March 7th four more people tested positive in Coevorden, where 
Bannink Packaging is based.

That day 900 students of the university society Vindicat returned from a 
mass ski trip in Piedmont in northern Italy in a convoy of buses to the 
Netherlands. Amid public concern, authorities met the students and 
tested four, who were found negative.

“Someone who has no symptoms is not contagious,” Jossy van den Boogaard, 
MD in infectious disease control at local health authority GGD Groningen 
told media.

“Can the students also infect others while they have no symptoms? No,” 
was the official advice. “What if someone decides to go to work or take 
an exam? This is their own responsibility.”
No panic

On March 8th it was announced that a cleaning lady married to a Bannink 
Packaging employee had tested positive. The director of the school she 
works at wrote to parents to say there was no reason to panic, and that 
children could go to school as normal.

By this point the outbreak in the carnival region of North Brabant had 
reached the point that there were shortages of protective equipment for 
health workers, and people were advised not to call their doctor unless 
their symptoms were serious.

Lawmaker Eva van Esch told parliament a friend of hers had tested 
positive who had been refused a test for a week after returning from 
Italy with symptoms. Once positive, the friend had been asked to keep 
the diagnosis quiet and not to tell her work or contacts, van Esch said.

“My party therefore wonders whether this government is actually focusing 
on preventing the spread of the disease, or whether the health services 
are primarily concerned with preventing panic,” van Esch said.

Dutch testing capacity is limited, forcing authorities to prioritise 
testing people with a clear link. Roughly 6,000 tests had been done in 
the Netherlands as of March 7th, national public health institute the 
RIVM said, a figure that includes double-testing to exclude false 
positives, and testing for recovery.

Twelve days after the first diagnosis, confirmed cases of Covid-19 in 
the Netherlands had risen from 1 to 382.

Naomi O’Leary discusses the Dutch approach to the coronavirus crisis on 
the World View podcast here