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Who knows, we might keep lockdowns at a distance. Fall and winter are hard enough already.
“They are selling like hot cakes again,” said the druggist in the shopping center behind me. He had put the corona tests back on the counter. In northern Germany, hospitals are forced to scale down regular care, not because of an influx of covid patients but because more and more staff are quarantined. Janosch Damen, health specialist in the party of the ruling party greens, is very concerned. He calls for the reintroduction of the mask obligation in public transport and confined spaces where many people come. As in the Netherlands, the starting point of the German covid policy is the personal responsibility of the citizen. That is now insufficient, says Damen. He demands the rollout of a campaign for the fourth shot, not only for people over the age of seventy, but for everyone. If none of that happens, Damen fears, major lockdowns will be inevitable again in the fall.
In the Netherlands it is emphatically heading in the same direction. The virus breaks through the vaccines, even in people who have already received a fourth shot. So far, it looks like the new wave will not have any major consequences for the ICs, but here too, outages due to illness and quarantine are causing disruptions. It has already been announced that in extreme emergency, nursing home staff may come to work with corona. For the time being, these are the only places in the Netherlands where the mouth cap has been reintroduced.
In other words: corona has not been conquered. We’ve had a pandemic vacation for a few months but it’s over now. It is not that the virus has been reduced to an annoyingly buzzing entity in the background, it continues to disrupt normal life as usual. It is therefore frivolous that the government is going into recess under the motto: appeal to the citizen’s sense of responsibility. Whistle the song of self-reliance.
Meanwhile, the crowded crowds at Europe’s increasingly chaotic airports are centers of contagion. The Netherlands is about to import the virus on a gigantic scale via the airports and who knows what surprising new variants are included.
The new wave coincides with an unprecedented energy crisis that demands that we use gas, electricity and fuels as economically as possible. A number of measures to achieve this have the additional advantage of preventing infections. The Dutch waste unimaginable amounts of energy in traffic jams and traffic jams that are once again part of everyday life.
Minister Jetten has already announced that companies can be disconnected if there is a real lack of energy. In fact, they will have to deal with a lockdown.
There is no denying that the government is failing to reintroduce home working advice for all those who do not necessarily have to be in the workplace. This prevents contamination and saves extra energy for the winter.
This measure saves a sip on a drink and has only beneficial effects on our health, our energy position, air quality and even a little on the CO2 and nitrogen problems.
Who knows, we might keep lockdowns at bay with it. Fall and winter are hard enough already.
For the rest, I am of the opinion that the subsidy scandal should not disappear from public attention, and neither should the Groningen natural gas affair.
Listen to The Memory Palace, the podcast by Han van der Horst and John Knieriem about politics and history.