Daily coronavirus infections rise to 779; Over 32,000 contagious

For the first time since April 24, over 700 new infections of the SARS-CoV-2 novel coronavirus were revealed in a single day by public health agency RIVM. The agency also updated its estimate to show that 32,451 people with the virus are currently contagious, roughly double the figure a week ago and the most since the first week of May.

Some 779 people tested positive for the virus according to preliminary data from the agency. It likely pushed the total number of known infections in the country to well over 60 thousand since the end of February.

The health agency said on Tuesday that the basic reproduction number (R) of the virus rose to 1.30, meaning every 100 people with the infection spreads the virus to 130 others. The R-number was 1.20 a week ago. The margin of error was still above 1.0, the level where the national government said it would consider placing new restrictions on society to slow the spread of the virus.

A spike in the number of contagious people was shown in data from the RIVM's modeling of how the virus has spread. The model showed that there were five-times more contagious people in the country than just three weeks ago, and more than ten times as many as in the first week of July.

The RIVM also said that 23 people have been admitted to hospitals since Saturday with Covid-19, the respiratory disease caused by the coronavirus strain. Seven patients were also moved into intensive care over that time.

"The number of admitted COVID patients varies slightly per day, but has increased by about 60% over the past 14 days," said Ernst Kuipers, the head of the Dutch acute care providers network. While 97 were being cared for outside of the ICU, a single-day decrease of two, there were 30 patients being treated for the coronavirus disease in a Dutch ICU on Tuesday, an increase of one.

Early data from nonprofit organization NICE confirmed that intensive care cases were on the rise. They said that 2,966 people in the Netherlands having entered an ICU for the coronavirus disease since the pandemic began. Of that group, 871 people died while in intensive care, and 1,919 former ICU patients were eventually discharged.