According to the OMT, the corona pandemic is over, writes Thijs Broer. But the ambiguity remains. Why has the government still not responded to the advice?
It is of a wonderful irony: the corona pandemic started and ended with carnival. In February 2020, when the virus was already spreading all over the world, it was RIVM boss Jaap van Dissel who declared just before carnival that there was no reason at all to put an end to the folk festival, because ‘you celebrate carnival usually in a fairly small group anyway’: a statement of astonishing ignorance, because shortly afterwards carnival in Brabant turned out to be a hotbed of the virus and the first deaths fell, as any layman could have predicted.
Last week, after exactly three years of lockdowns, school closures, curfews, violent riots, millions of infections and an estimated 45,000 deaths in the Netherlands alone, the OMT, led by the same Jaap van Dissel, issued the latest advice: the pandemic is officially over, covid has reached the ‘endemic phase’, the quarantine measures can be released, there is no longer any need for major…