Total Covid-19 ICU patients drops below 1,000; Some measures could be relaxed: ICU boss

The number of patients in intensive care for respiratory illness Covid-19 dropped to 963 on Friday. It was the twelfth day in a row that the number of Covid-19 patients in ICU fell.

Records showed that 45 fewer people were being treated in ICU compared to the total on Thursday, according to LCPS, the office coordinating patient transportation. Figures from nonprofit intensive care organization NICE estimate that the last time there were fewer than a thousand patients in intensive care for the coronavirus disease was on March 28.

Diederik Gommers, chairman of intensive care association NVIC, told newspaper AD on Friday that the number of ICU patients is dropping "quite quickly". He therefore thinks measures can be relaxed faster. According to him, it no longer makes sense to keep everything closed until May 20.

"If schools open on May 11, you will only see the effects of this at the end of May if it will lead to additional hospital admissions. Then a new decision on relaxing rules after May 20 does not make much sense. A relaxation could have happened now, or one of these days. Thus in three weeks you can see what is happening, and you can, for example, reconsider the school decision," he said to the newspaper.

While the use of ICU beds for Covid-19 still remained high, since up until the pandemic there were just 1,150 ICU beds in the entire country, there was enough space in Dutch hospitals to provide intensive care space to 388 patients without a coronavirus infection. That was helped further by German medical centers which were still treating 41 patients from the Netherlands on Friday.

To date, NICE estimated that 2,722 patients were treated in ICU for Covid-19, of which 652 passed away. Another 585 were still being treated in another department after a period in ICU, and 521 have been released from hospital.