The fact that corona minister Ernst Kuipers is already working under political pressure is thanks to the previous cabinet. Like most other countries, the Netherlands started the fight against corona with little preparation. More embarrassingly, ‘pandemic preparedness’ remained too low in the following two years. The breathing breaks in the summers of 2020 and 2021 were insufficiently used to be ready for the next round. We owed it to last winter’s hard lockdown.
For Kuipers, life is even more complicated than in previous summers. The breather has now been going on for three months, the corona dashboard has become a forgotten corner on the internet, the urgency in the country is diminishing by the day. Moreover, no one knows exactly what to prepare for. Covid-19 will return in the fall, that much is certain, but in what guise? And are the millions of vaccines in the warehouses up to it? Everything depends on that.
Kuipers contributed to the relaxation earlier this year when he stated that he wants to do it without lockdowns from now on: ‘We have to go for that.’ Nobody will disagree with this, but Kuipers also knows that everything depends on the effect of the next virus variant on hospital occupancy. Therefore, now is not the time to raise expectations too high.
Operational at the end of this year
Now is the time to take everything into account. The cabinet is really busy with the strategy, Kuipers emphasized on Friday after consultations in the Council of Ministers. An appeal to individual responsibility in the vulnerable sectors plays an important role in this. They must be on time with the walkways, the mudguards and the ventilation. The cabinet itself promises that the GGDs will scale up at lightning speed this time. It also makes an ‘analysis’ of all initiatives in the country to control the situation in hospitals this time.
At the same time, the problem of Dutch crisis care – the totally fragmented management that caused so much delay – is being solved by Kuipers with a ‘national infectious disease functionality’ that will take control from now on. ‘It will ensure that the scaling up for testing and vaccination can be done more quickly’, according to the department. It quietly adds that that ‘functionality’ should be operational by the end of this year.
At the end of this year. As long as it’s not in the middle of a lockdown.
The position of the newspaper is expressed in the Volkskrant Commentaar. It is created after a discussion between the commentators and the editor-in-chief.