Had there not been a war in Ukraine, last Friday might have taken on the allure of a ‘liberation day’ in the Netherlands. That day, the one and a half meter society came to an end – a milestone that now passed almost unnoticed.
Almost everything that was banned for months is allowed again. Going to a packed pub late into the night, dancing body to body in a disco, sitting knee to knee in a theater, hugging each other in the street without fear of the prying eye of an enforcer.
For many, it will also feel like a liberation that the mouth cap and the corona admission ticket are almost no longer mandatory. The mask only applies to public transport, and anyone who wants to go to a large nightclub or an indoor festival must show a negative test result. In mid-March, the cabinet will examine whether these latter restrictions can be lifted.
But even if all measures are lifted, not everything will be as it used to be, before corona. The crisis has left deep marks in the lives of citizens. Taking stock of two years of corona provides a worrying list of negative effects and problems that remain.
Many people have become anxious and depressed. Young people in particular reported more psychological problems. The suicide rate increased, as did the violence behind front doors. The closure of education mainly affected pupils who were already disadvantaged. Thus the inequality of opportunity grew.
As Covid-19 predated, medical treatments for other conditions were postponed – with sometimes serious consequences. In addition, there is a significant group of ex-Covid patients with long-term complaints.
Where one citizen became paralyzed, the other became more rebellious. Part of the population thought the yoke of the measures was too heavy, wanted freedom back, and mistrusted the intentions of the government and therefore also the vaccine. Painfully enough, that loss of authority was partly due to gossip by the government itself, such as the faltering mouth cap policy (first dismissed as nonsense, then made mandatory). The debate about 2G fueled the dissatisfaction even further.
That civil liberties are now being restored is cause for relief. But there is also reason for vigilance: the coronavirus has not been eradicated, there are vulnerable groups who are less well protected by the release of the measures, and if the virus mutates into a more dangerous variant, all signals will be red again. It is therefore entirely conceivable that measures such as the mouth cap, the corona pass and the one and a half meters will ever return.
It is to be hoped that the legal basis for curtailments will be solid in the next wave of corona. The piece of string legislation must be over. In the first phase of the pandemic, the cabinet intervened via local emergency ordinances, while the parliament was sidelined at all levels. Then came a corona emergency law that was constantly repaired. Drastic measures such as the curfew were announced at press conferences and could only be adjusted slightly afterwards by the House.
The Council of State recently sounded the alarm: sound legislation must be introduced and parliament must be given a serious role in decision-making. A valid advice: as a democracy, the Netherlands owes this to itself. Only when this has been arranged can citizens really enjoy their regained freedom.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC on the morning of February 28, 2022