Sources from The Hague report this to De Telegraaf.
Instead of the tight hand from above, the Dutch will now have to take measures themselves to ensure that they do not infect themselves and each other. This is a clear shift from the policy that the cabinet had previously pursued, in which firm action was taken and lockdowns were introduced several times to slow down the spread of corona.
Prevent infection yourself
The cabinet expects that citizens – who have become aware of the basic measures after two years of the pandemic – will ensure that they do not become infected. Ventilating, wearing face masks where necessary, and perhaps not all huddled together in the pub in winter: the cabinet hopes that the Netherlands will be wise enough to think of this for itself. Companies are also expected to protect their staff: this means that in the event of complaints or illness they should not be forced to show up anyway, something that often happened ‘pre-corona’.
The corona support for companies – which will disappear on April 1 – will also be a thing of the past if it is up to the cabinet. The subsidy infusion was necessary at the time to rescue ailing entrepreneurs, but it also sounds within the cabinet that it had an unhealthy effect because it artificially kept ailing companies going.
Test facilities scaled down
According to government sources, the test facilities of the GGD will soon also be scaled down. Testing for corona therefore becomes the responsibility of the citizen, which can be done either via the well-known self-tests, but The Hague is also looking at the possibility of having this done by general practitioners. In this way, people would still be able to receive a proof of recovery, which of course is not possible with a self-test.
When the GGD no longer conducts large-scale tests, the cabinet will want to monitor the spread of the virus and the emergence of new variants in a different way. Sewage surveillance, something that is already being done on a random basis, can provide a solution for this. The Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport is also looking at a ‘broader way of modelling’ the corona spread, because RIVM models often proved inaccurate in the past.
Still worried
Although the new line of the cabinet is based on the optimism that we can control corona ourselves, there are also concerns. ‘Corona will not go away and is not the flu,’ is the warning. The emergence of a new variant may, for example, mean that measures will have to be taken again in the long run. The cabinet also hopes that there will be more enthusiasm for booster injections. The enthusiasm for this is declining rapidly, probably due to the mildness of the omicron variant. Even among the frail and the elderly, the cabinet sees the number of people who come to get a repeat shot decrease.
The long-term plan that corona minister Ernst Kuipers will release next week is part of a broader change of course. He previously announced that as far as he is concerned, limitations in society should no longer be the dominant factor. “We are moving away from the exclusion of risks to more control and to a way of life that is as normal as possible,” said Kuipers earlier. Keeping society open should form the starting point.