The abundant testing against corona that the cabinet promised in May will not get going in practice, Rutte was told at the General Discussion. According to one, Prime Minister Rutte does not have his figures in order, according to Rutte himself it is because people without complaints are also tested. But what about really? Three statements weighted.
1. THE FIGURES DO NOT MATCH
Verdict: possibly true
30,000 tests a day in the summer, 70,000 in December, and at the peak of the flu season in February, 85,000 tests a day. So many tests are needed to serve everyone with a cold, Corona Minister Hugo de Jonge recently wrote in a letter to the Lower House.
But however precise those numbers may sound, the “calculations of the RIVM” to which the minister refers, are by no means. RIVM modellers made the estimate last spring, by looking at the number of people with respiratory complaints who showed up in recent years at a “monitoring station” of health organization Nivel. Such a monitoring station is a normal general practice that takes a nose and throat sample from patients, so that people can see what kind of germs are circulating.
Assume that about 10 percent of people with respiratory complaints also go to the doctor, and you roughly arrive at the monthly figures that modeller Pieter de Boer calculated for RIVM last spring.
But there are huge uncertainties in that estimate, De Boer and RIVM chief model Jacco Wallinga are the first to admit that. For example, the Nivel figures are not at all intended to count how many people have a cold: they differ enormously from year to year. Translated into practice, this quickly amounts to tens of thousands of people more or less.
“We certainly do not want to create false precision. Our calculation is designed to get a sense of what to expect, “says Wallinga. “This isn’t a law of nature like the gravitational constant or something. For us it was the order of magnitude: ten times as few tests would be too few, ten times as many tests would be unnecessary. And to be honest, what we’re seeing so far is surprisingly consistent with that expectation. ”
This is quite in contrast to the certainty with which the numbers now pass over the conference tables in The Hague. “These are the figures that the RIVM provides us, we take that into account,” said a spokesperson for the minister. We thought that 30,000 tests a day would be enough, Prime Minister Rutte said during the General Discussions on Thursday.
In the meantime, it is completely unclear whether we can expect more or fewer respiratory complaints in the coming season than in recent years. On the one hand, a new respiratory disease has emerged: that should boost the numbers. On the other hand, the experience of recent months in the southern hemisphere shows that the corona measures have as a side effect that there are also fewer flu and cold viruses circulating: that would reduce the number.
So has De Jonge made a crucial mistake by calling the rough estimates hard expectations? That may be part of the explanation. But there is one more thing:
2. THERE ARE TOO MANY “FUN TESTERS” WITHOUT COMPLAINTS
Verdict: only half true
You will always see: if you give them free tests, they will take advantage of it. That’s how it went at least in recent weeks, is a persistent complaint that can be heard from the test streets and the reports.
“It goes wrong if people without complaints have themselves tested,” complained the Health and Youth Care Inspectorate on Thursday in an evaluation. The ‘pleasure testers’, as they have come to be called, would spoil the party and, according to Minister De Jonge, among others, explain why the number of tests is increasing so quickly: barely 10 thousand a day in July, 15 thousand in August, about 27 thousand per day now.
According to the RIVM Behavior Monitor, a questionnaire study that gives an impression of the testing behavior among the Dutch population, 11 percent of the people who recently had themselves tested admitted that they had indeed done so without complaints. Logical: registering is easy, free and in no time.
But at least as striking is the increase in honest testers, the people with complaints who go to the test street. In June, only 12 percent of them were tested, according to the responses of the behavior monitor, in July 18 percent, and in mid-August, 32 percent of people with complaints said they were tested – almost doubling in a month.
If you look at it that way, the increased crowds seem to be mainly due to the fact that citizens are simply responding better to the calls from the government to take a test in case of mild complaints. People with complaints of which they already know the probable cause – the proverbial hay fever patients – can still be tested in one in five cases, just to be sure, according to the RIVM poll; in people with “new” symptoms this is almost half.
Let’s estimate. Count out the pleasure testers, and include the people with complaints who are not going to the test street right now, and the current influx at the test street would not get smaller – it would increase. Instead of the current 27 thousand people a day, around 70 thousand people would pass by. Those few thousand pleasant testers make little difference on such a number.
3. THE FACTORIES DO NOT DELIVER ENOUGH
Verdict: probably correct
But besides shaky numbers and a growing run on the test street, there is something else why corona testing is so bad. A deeper reason: worldwide shortage of just about everything.
“We suddenly started testing very hard worldwide,” says Edwin Boel, medical microbiologist and project leader of the ‘national diagnostic chain coordination team’ (LCDK), the organization that distributes the distribution of test equipment across the country from the Ministry of VWS. “That puts a lot of demand among suppliers, who have started to scale up, but were unable to keep up with it so quickly.”
Behind the scenes there are harsh words about this. “You can ask yourself whether manufacturers are going to invest in a more or less temporary market. Everyone knows that this crisis has come to an end, “says a closely involved physician microbiologist, who does not want to be named by name because of his position. “The manufacturers are at the controls,” says Marc Bonten, professor of medical microbiology in Utrecht. “They can make and break governments and make lucrative, long-term contracts with the big laboratories.”
Boel expresses himself a bit more diplomatically: “ The great scarcity has created an international market where some countries may exert a little more pressure and where sometimes power play is also used. ” He is familiar with the case of a manufacturer – he does not want to mention the name. – which suddenly reduced its promised deliveries to European countries to just one third. “We think under pressure from the US.”
The result is that the Netherlands has to bite on a piece of cake, while in Germany especially the cotton buds still reach into the sky, many think. “Germany has, so to speak, an oversized fleet,” says Boel. “There were already a lot of large machines there, in large labs.” This allowed the country to close faster, larger deals with suppliers than the Netherlands, where the analysis laboratories are more of a patchwork.
A look abroad does indeed show that the Netherlands is not alone in the top position. “Many areas worldwide are experiencing a shortage of laboratory-based molecular tests,” consulting firm McKinsey recently noted in a “quick scan” of the global market. South America and Africa in particular would not be able to buy nearly enough tests, but the US, Canada and many European countries are also dire. In the United Kingdom, for example, this week it turned out that in some of the most affected corona areas suddenly no longer had a test.
Nevertheless, Boel is quite optimistic about the near future. “This takes time,” he says. “And we are also getting more and more allocated, because the suppliers are still scaling up. Signing contracts with foreign labs will also provide a lot of extra capacity. “A lot is also expected from the new generation, fast corona tests, which work in a different way and therefore require different equipment.
“The great unknown is a bit of the test question,” Boel points out. “Before the summer it fell short of what we expected, and now demand is just a bit ahead of it.”
