The Netherlands of the lock? – NRC
Even at the Outbreak Management Team, they seem to be getting tired of corona, and maybe even corona despondent. The suspicion came to me when I visited Diederik Gommers last Friday On 1 saw performance.
The Netherlands has not been asked from the lock, especially by presenter Jort Kelder, who has already asked this question because the pandemic had not yet started. “We are over-80s who are overweight and have smoked,” Kelder said nearly two years ago.
he started a discussion that continues to this day – and that of tomorrow and the day after. For Gommers and his fellow advisers at the OMT, it is a question to which they have never given a clear answer.
‘In the ideal world’, Gommers now said, ‘you let people under fifty start one and they build up a natural immunity. The problem is that the virus is very much circulating and the movements will take place. We cannot completely protect the elderly 100 percent, then you know that people are dying.”
“You can also stay inside”, Kelder coolly, “it is also a choice how you live.”
Gommers preferred to pass that hot potato to the cabinet. “Now is the time when you as a cabinet can say: ‘We no longer just follow the advice of the OMT.'” In other words: find out, guys, we have been pulling the cart for two years, but in fact we have all the while avoiding the key question: to what extent should the generation sacrifice itself for the elderly?
You can’t blame the OMT for not providing an ambiguous answer to that question, but you can blame it for giving the impression that Covid-19 was merely a medical issue without any more dimension. Now that it is clear that Covid-19 will never pass, as Ernst Kuipers, the new Minister of Health, Welfare and Sport, recently stated in the NOS News said, experts and laymen look at each other in amazement: what to do? Should the Netherlands be unlocked by putting the elderly behind the lock (preferably not the bolt)? Jort Kelder already knows the answer, now the rest of the Netherlands still does, even apart from the wappies, who are neither reactions in questions nor in answers.
In recent weeks I have wandered often enough through a desolate, soulless Amsterdam to come to the conclusion: it can no longer be like this. Deserted shopping streets, closed theatres, cafes and restaurants, bookstores that are no longer allowed to look a book – this is no longer living with your younger generations for an unlimited period of time. Not only the economic, but also the need will become too great.
When the current lockdown ends at the end of January, a new perspective will have to emerge. The Young Netherlands is fully back to work outside, the Old Netherlands is moderating and living more gradually than before.
With this caveat, though I come back to the doctors: the emergence and circulation of the virus should not aggravate the situation in hospitals with the whole society – burdened by it. The OMT can best give purely personal advice about this, later Diederik Gommers will give Jort Kelder a few things.
A version of this article also in NRC in the morning of January 10, 2022