Marcel Levi is an internist, chairman of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) and professor of medicine at the University of Amsterdam.
How long is that corona ticket still needed?
“Keeping the corona ticket has, if I’m being very honest, almost nothing to do with contagiousness or hospital admissions. It is mainly a political decision. The discussion is also very political. If you look at substantive arguments, you see that they are slowly but surely decaying. But you should also look abroad. They all still do it there, and sometimes even more fanatically than in the Netherlands. Especially in the period when many people go on holiday again, towards the summer, I think it would be useful to all do about the same within Europe.”
So that would be an argument to keep it?
“Yes, but to what extent you should keep that mandatory in all sectors to which it now applies, politicians will have to make a decision. That’s hardly a medical discussion anymore. Of course it also depends on how long we continue to vaccinate. In some cases, people now feel obliged to take a booster, when they might not otherwise, just to get that corona ticket. That will of course become more complicated in the future.”
Many people have another corona app on their phone: the CoronaMelder app. Does it actually still work?
“That thing really never did. We can forget that now. I’d even like to take it one step further than stopping all those apps and QR codes: shouldn’t we stop all that testing for once? We don’t do that continuous testing for other infectious diseases either. Why do we keep doing that? It costs a lot of money, but what does it actually get us? Because all the people who test positive, they are at home, but they are actually not that sick at all. Their relatives, who are not sick at all, are also at home. We make it very difficult for ourselves.”
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