It is exactly five years ago, March 1, 2020, that Corona reached Drenthe. The first contamination was with a resident of Dalen.
In the Radio Drenthe program Cassata The Asser Mayor Marco Out looks back. He is chairman of the Drenthe Security Region. “In all crisis books, a pandemic is mentioned as one of the big risks. But we didn’t know much about the impact at the time.”
Virologist Bert Niesters from Zeegse, professor at the University of Groningen, also looks back in Cassata. “We already realized something when a cruise ship was put aside in Japan and no one was allowed to get off.” The virus then came to Europe. In Italy, the situation was soon dramatic. “Then I was called that we were all about to discuss the condition in the UMCG. I still have the photo of a full room with 200 people.”
The scripts were ready, but a pandemic never adheres to a scenario. “It was the first time for all of us,” said Out. “I wanted to try to prepare, but you still wonder what is coming at you. And you hope that the virus might be isolated.”
De Hoop was located at the Earies Hospital in Utrecht. A new virus can sometimes be isolated there, if that enters the country with a certain flight, for example. But that turned out not to work. “It really went really fast. In the first week of March was also the first meeting of the presidents of the security regions.”
Yet it took a while for the meetings to be well organized. “The first time we were in a room with two ministers, 25 presidents of the safety regions, and director Jaap van Dissel from the RIVM.
There are permanent consequences of the coronac crisis. In health, for the people who have sustained Long Covid and still feel the consequences of the disease. But also practical things have changed.
“A big difference is that we do much more online,” says virologist Niesters. “For Corona, every meeting in Utrecht was, now we meet online. That is a lot more efficient and saves a lot of time.”
Yet five years later we are not better prepared. One of the problems at the time was the limited number of beds in the Intensive Care of the hospitals. “There are now fewer IC beds, yes,” Niesters acknowledges. “300 Less, that is unimaginable. And the staff always remains a problem. That is short everywhere and there is a big course among the staff working on the IC.”
Mayor Marco Out also sees that the coronacrisis is sometimes far away. “We started doing things differently, that’s right. But for some people it has already dropped quite far. A kind of denial phase, which is created again. It has now been scaled up three years ago since most measures have been scaled up. But I still see entrepreneurs who have not come over the tick.”
There was plenty of corona tune, but there were rules attached to it. “For one that was clearer than for the other. People have lost their business. And of course people personally experienced a lot of sad circumstances. The youth has also had two very different years. We are three years later and many people are over until the order of the day. So you see very different sentiments mixed up.”
At the time, authorities brought little popular news. Mayor Out: “The limitations were difficult, and you also saw a lot of denial. Now, after a few years, you still see in newspapers and social media that people contradict that all those measures have been wise. But we went close to the edge and many more people would have died without the measures.”
“Nobody had ever experienced such a pandemic, a real one. The previous pandemic was about ten years earlier, the Mexican flu. But that was really nothing compared to Corona,” says Virologist Niesters. “The pandemies of the last century were much more limited in size. But in the meantime we live on this earth with a lot of people. We live very close together and fly an accident. So the danger is still lurking.”