The evaluation has started, but the hard nuts will be cracked later

Practicing and thinking always helps, even with the inevitable improvisation once a crisis presents itself.

It remains as the political image of the start of the corona crisis in the Netherlands: Minister Bruins who on March 18, 2020, has to explain to an increasingly angry House of Representatives why the Netherlands has such a shortage of IC capacity, of protective equipment, of everything actually, then panics that he will arrange it all immediately and then crashes.

With the evaluation report of the Dutch Safety Board published on Wednesday, the diagnosis can be made even better than at the time: there is a minister who is expected to combat an acute crisis, but has since found out that he is not prepared for it and that moreover, he does not have the power or the means to do so.

It is the clearest conclusion of the Dutch Safety Board: until March 2020, infectious disease control was not taken seriously enough. They had practiced, but only on short-term crises. There was no script. The minister was supposed to take charge, but it turned out that he did not have a central command structure at his disposal. In general, too long reliance was placed on the typical Dutch intricate network of general practitioners, nursing home doctors and autonomous municipal health services – a network that usually brings a lot of good but does not arrive at a uniform approach quickly enough in the event of a national crisis.

Due to the lack of a crisis structure, the approach had to be changed at crucial moments, the seriousness of the situation in the nursing homes was recognized too late and there was uncertainty in the highest circles about the purpose of the operation, which also caused communication to falter.

Those conclusions are not surprising. The cabinet already drew them in part in 2020, through Bruins’ successor Hugo de Jonge: ‘There is a lot to be said about our healthcare system, but you can also point out vulnerabilities. The decentralized design is one of them.’ Until now, however, the government has not wanted to engage in a fundamental debate about it, always arguing that it was still too busy fighting the crisis.

That is why the OVV report comes at an excellent time. Now that the arrival of the omikron variant has heralded relaxation, the time has come to ensure that the Netherlands responds better to the next infectious disease. After SARS and the Mexican flu, this was already the third new virus in this century that spread rapidly through a globalized world. Twice we got away well, the third time not. Number four is a matter of time. And nobody knows how that virus will behave and who the vulnerable people will be, but practice and thinking beforehand always helps; also with the inevitable improvisation once the time has come.

Rutte, De Jonge and OMT chairman Van Dissel will not be dissatisfied in the meantime. Despite all the criticism, the Dutch Safety Board shows great understanding for the unprecedented circumstances and the uncertainty they had to work with in those first months. The question is whether others would have done better.

But that will not remain the case, because the evaluation after July 2020 will follow. Then the panic was over and the virus was no longer unknown, but the crisis team still too often gave the impression that it was not in control of the situation. Almost everything started too late, from the testing policy to the vaccination campaigns, and time and again the cabinet had to return to the expectations it had created itself. Finally, the Netherlands ended up being pretty much the only Western European country that still needed a lockdown at the end of 2021 to keep the situation manageable.

The Dutch Safety Board will have to work on that.