The country followed perhaps the most lenient quarantine rules, but avoided a tragic scenario: a national trait helped

The morning of May 15 was, of course, completely different. Almost every store has opened, but builders who have rushed to improve infrastructure with less traffic are actually outshining shoppers. Among them, you might meet Gerard Zandbergen on the street, who runs Locatus, a Dutch research firm that provides data on the Benelux region and European cities to clients like banks, retailers and government agencies.

“Our customers want to know how many people pass by his shop every hour and every day, and how many come in,” says Zandbergen, having coffee with him near the Begijnhof, a 14th-century courtyard. Strategically installed sensors in shopping areas collect signals from adjacent phones, which the company examines and determines how many people pass through a particular location at any given time. The Locatus data is reminiscent of the information provided by Google and Apple to health authorities and other organizations to understand the impact of the quarantine on global mobility, but these latest data are much more detailed.

On March 12, two weeks after the first case of COVID-19 was diagnosed in the Netherlands, the country’s Prime Minister Mark Rutte held a press conference to ask, that is, ask, do not order, to the entire population of the country as much as possible. Work from home. Data collected by Locatus two days later showed that pedestrian traffic on busy commercial streets like Kalverstraat decreased by approximately 80 percent. In Paris and Madrid, after national governments introduced mandatory “stay at home” measures, visitors to shopping areas have dropped by about 95%, Zandbergen tells me, both sitting on a bench within a reasonable distance of one of the other.

But two kilometers from the De Pijpo district, on Ferdinand Blostraat, with its Albert Heijn shopping center, Ron Verboom bakery and Simon Levelt specialty coffee and tea shop, the picture is completely different. Pedestrian traffic in neighboring commercial neighborhoods in the Netherlands has remained largely unchanged since Mr. Rutte’s request was made. “People still need to eat and take care of themselves,” says Zandbergen.

And in many cases, the Dutch acted in a really responsible way. Store owners remodeled the shelves, attaching special construction strips to the crossings to instruct shoppers to keep a safe distance. The allowed flow of people is regulated by limiting the number of free shopping carts, and staff at the store entrance check to see if everyone has them. Most buyers leave the country, passing another to avoid getting too close.

This procedure entered into force in an improvised manner in the first weeks after Mrs. Rutte’s appeal. Although restaurants are struggling to keep up, Thijmen de Loos, the owner of Simon Levelt, who I buy coffee from, says the business has really grown since the first day of quarantine, even if food delivery services in the office have collapsed. “No one asks for coffee in the offices now,” he says with a crooked smile.

While Paris, Milan, Madrid, and many other European cities became virtually unrecognizable through quarantine, life in Amsterdam did not change much. Children in Spain were prohibited from leaving the house for six weeks. Parisians face a fine if they do not complete and submit a form that explains each of their departures from home. Although traffic in Amsterdam slowed, I still had to maneuver through pedestrians, bicycles, cars, delivery vans, and trams on the way to a meeting with Mr. Zandbergen. More than three months after the outbreak began in the country, the Netherlands has not suffered a single day of quarantine as strict as is customary elsewhere.

“We are choosing the following scenario: a controlled distribution of the infection among the groups with the highest risk of serious disease,” Rutte said in a speech to the nation on March 15. The essence of such a strategy was “to increase group immunity in a controlled way”. Sweden is the only country in Europe with fewer restrictions, and the number of deaths there is much higher.

The strategy is risky. In the Netherlands, almost 6,000 people have died from COVID-19 and less than 6% are infected. population, leaving plenty of room for subsequent waves. “We need to be vigilant,” said Eileen Choffnes, former director of the US National Academy Medical Forum. USA About Microbial Threats, currently a consultant on infectious diseases. According to her, allowing a partial spread of the virus is equivalent to allowing some people to die. Maggie de Block, the Belgian Minister of Public Health, strongly criticizes this Dutch approach. “They allow the virus to spread freely,” De Morgen told the Brussels newspaper. “It is a dangerous attitude.”

The mitigation phase of the Dutch response to the coronavirus was largely triggered compared to neighboring countries. The Netherlands, like most European countries, was hit hard at the start of the pandemic, but it is also distinguished by the fact that it had one of the shortest peaks in new cases in the world. On March 26, the number of deaths doubled every five days; after two weeks of death, growth slowed to eleven days; and as testing accelerated, mortality from the virus continued to decline rapidly. The number of new hospitalizations per day decreased from a peak of 610 cases reached on March 28 to an average of one per day in the last week of May.

Mortality compared to the same period last year (an indicator calculated to estimate the actual number of deaths from coronavirus without accurate data) increased by 50 percent. during the blackest phase of the outbreak. But already around May 22, it has already been reduced to zero, according to data from the Dutch government. According to EuroMomo, the mortality monitoring organization, the jump is less than the increase in Belgium, Italy or Spain, all of which had introduced stricter measures (only Germany, whose quarantine was less strict than in some European countries, but more stringent than in the Netherlands). In Amsterdam, the death rate this spring was almost the same as usual. Dutch intensive care units have never been overfilled and are now empty enough to allow for the resumption of planned necessary operations.

The Netherlands smoothed the curve and kept the lives of its citizens as tolerable as possible.
Rutte’s government reacted slowly to COVID-19 at the start of the outbreak. On January 24, France reported the first case of coronavirus in Europe, and the news has cast doubt on China’s claims that there is no clear evidence of person-to-person transmission of the virus. On February 4, a Belgian who flew from Wuhan to the Netherlands was diagnosed with COVID-19; At that time, it could be safely assumed that SARS-CoV-2 had arrived in the country. However, from February 21 to 23. During the weekend, M. Rutte did not interrupt the carnival parties; In the southern part of the country, where Catholics predominate, carnival goers had fun in crowded bars, and it was this region that soon became the focus of the virus.

Only on March 9, he was advised by the Prime Minister and the coalition government, led by Mr Rutte’s center-right People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy, to quit shaking hands and ask the people of the South North Brabant, where almost half of all cases were registered, working. from home. The Netherlands had already registered 321 infections. Three days later, the recommendation to work from home was already circulating throughout the country. Ms. Rutte banned events involving more than 100 people and asked professional doctors not to leave the country.

It closed schools on March 15, but allowed daycare centers in some of them to care for the children of key service workers. Groups of more than three people (excluding family members) were required to maintain a distance of 1.5 meters from each other, a restriction that remains in force, failure to comply with a fine of 390 euros (US $ 345) without reservation . Cafes, bars, restaurants, gyms and any professional activities where close contact with customers is inevitable, such as the offices of dentists and hairdressers (and brothels, after all, here in the Netherlands) had to close in an hour. But parks, beaches, and shops, not just ‘staples’ like food, pharmacies, and gas stations, could continue to function.

The Netherlands have chosen, in Rutte’s words, ‘smart quarantine’. In his national speech to the nation, the last time the Dutch head of government addressed the country on television in the 1970s when the oil crisis erupted, he emphasized that restrictions come at a price, even if it is not felt immediately. . “We will continue to find a balance between the necessary measures and the possibilities of continuing to live a normal life as much as possible,” he said.

Mr. Rutte’s guiding principles, which allow people to leave their homes but rely on them to keep a safe distance, required strong support from their constituents. “The whole plan was based on public support,” said Daana Roovers, MD, a professor of philosophy at the University of Amsterdam and a “thinker of the fatherland” (an unofficial title given to her by Philosopher magazine and the De Trouw newspaper. ).

“When you introduce a rule in the Netherlands, you will always get a lot of resistance, we are not very obedient,” he said. “So giving people a little room to maneuver on their own will give them more support and make their plan more successful.”

It is encoded in Dutch history and national character. Bas Heijne, author of articles for the NRC Amsterdam newspaper, who lives part-time in Paris, says France “pays a lot of attention to procedures: a decorative element, a ritual of bureaucracy.” In the Netherlands, by contrast, “the focus of the crisis is more about people’s own responsibility: perception must come from within, without breaking the rules.”

And indeed, on March 12, Mr. Rutte stated: “I want to urge you all not to turn a blind eye to each other. Help each other whenever possible. ” Advertisements at Amsterdam metro stations echo the Prime Minister’s calls: passengers are asked to keep a distance of 1.5 meters every few minutes (in Dutch and English).

For the Dutch, who sacrificed a degree of freedom for common purpose, the concept dates back to the 11th century, when the Dutch began cooperating to drain wetlands to reclaim land that, in the form of farms, was shared among volunteers. According to a survey by Motivaction and WIN / Gallup, nine out of ten Dutch people admitted in March this year that they “agree to give up part of their individual freedoms just to stop the spread of the coronavirus.”

The Outbreak Management Team, which advises Ms. Rutte, is comprised of epidemiologists, medical therapists, and public health experts, but does not include economists or entrepreneurs. Although the group’s public statements did not indicate that the long-term health or economic effects were not taken into account when deciding how to combat coronavirus, the Netherlands gross domestic product (GDP) contracted 1.7% in the first quarter, while the GDP of the European Union fell 3% during the same period. .5 percent.

Research is increasingly gathering evidence that the ‘smart quarantine’ will benefit both the Dutch economy in the short term and the country’s health in the long term. In short, poverty is detrimental to your health, and efforts to prevent it raise the economic bar by reducing medical costs. Strict quarantine can have social, economic, and health consequences that will not be felt for several years or even decades. Adult health and risk of disease are associated with harmful experiences in childhood and even during pregnancy. If your mother is malnourished during pregnancy, you have an increased risk of cardiovascular disease. And the powerful ice cream storm that hit Quebec in 1998, during which four million people were without power for nearly a month, reveals far-reaching consequences: Women in that year gave birth to low-birth-weight babies (who they can cause lifelong health problems), with weaker fine motor functions (which may be the predictor of poorer learning outcomes in primary classes).

“What we do for health will also have an impact on the economic recovery,” he said. In a letter to Parliament, the Minister of Health, Hugo de Jonge, wrote explaining his recommendations to Mr. Rutte. “There is no contradiction here: they are two sides of the same coin.”

The Netherlands can afford a milder response to the coronavirus because its population has more, according to New York University economist Michael Grossman, “health capital.” The Dutch are less likely than their neighbors to suffer from diseases that aggravate patients with COVID-19. The Netherlands has fewer obese and smokers compared to almost all European countries, and the country has the lowest rate of obstructive heart disease in the region. The Dutch could be compared to a business that was ordered to close, but which has enough financial resources to survive: its “health reserves” are relatively large to fight the disease.

Dutch health agencies are actively recruiting people to test and trace contacts, and while critics say their efforts are not fast enough, on May 6 the country exceeded the World Health Organization testing standard ( WHO). Mr. Rutte lifted some of the restriction measures on May 11. Elementary schools could open under certain conditions. My youngest daughter’s school included additional tools, such as scheduling an arrival time and gluing yellow strips to the hallways floor to indicate to students the direction of their movement. Other schools require washing hands between classes.

Hairdressers and dentists (but not prostitutes) have already resumed their activities by introducing additional precautions. Some branches of the library are already operating in Amsterdam. Locatus data shows that foot traffic in Kalverstraaat has almost returned to pre-pandemic levels. In Sweden, the central figure in response to the coronavirus outbreak, Anders Tegnell, spoke on national radio on June 2: “If we were destined to face the same disease again, knowing what we know now, I think we would choose an intermediate scenario for Sweden and the rest of the world. “Tegnell said. One of those intermediate responses would undoubtedly be the Dutch strategy.

In the Netherlands, open terraces for cafes, bars and restaurants opened on June 1, with tables separated from each other, and order takers always wonder if groups of more than three people are from the same family. (But most importantly, now that restaurants meet the new requirements, it has become an almost impossible mission for visitors who are thirsty to escape their homes to get a table.)

“We will try to complete it as soon as possible, but not at the expense of liability,” Rutte told reporters on May 6. – It is better to be careful today than to repent tomorrow. Such a warning is associated with all the things we are talking about today. We can only open the Netherlands on one condition: if everyone continues to act wisely. “

This will not be easy to achieve. As air temperatures soared during the national holiday on May 21, crowds of people became too large to keep a safe physical distance in the parks, and police closed them to new visitors. Until the next vacation, scheduled for June 1, Amsterdam authorities installed crowd control fences and painted wheels in the meadow to separate the groups from each other. After such prolonged isolation, “street traffic is likely to be extremely heavy,” speculates Martin Potgiesser, the owner of the De Pizzakamer pizzeria near my home. “Much bigger than last summer.”