Hospitals would be overloaded in all cases in the event of an outbreak of the corona virus. That was already clear at RIVM before the first corona patient was in the Netherlands. But hospitals were not warned about this by the Ministry of Health at the time, and were therefore unable to prepare for the impact of the corona crisis at that time.
This is according to research by the NOS. Several experts, including Diederik Gommers (Erasmus MC and then chairman of the intensive care physicians), Bart Berden (Elisabeth-TweeSteden Hospital) and Jan Kluytmans (UMC Utrecht), are unpleasantly surprised and consider it a missed opportunity that the information was not available at the time. shared with hospitals. “If we had known this, we could have scaled up a lot sooner, that would have saved a lot of stress,” says Gommers, for example.
The modellers of the RIVM already sent a memo to the management on 9 February. It stated that there are approximately 37,000 hospital beds in the Netherlands, including 1,208 operational IC beds. That capacity is insufficient. Three weeks later, on February 27, 2020, the first corona patient was only registered in the Netherlands.
According to the NOS, the Ministry of VWS did not inform the House of Representatives about the risk analysis because it was seen as one of several scenarios.
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