Covid-19 hospitalizations double; Official weekly coronavirus report shows 52% increase

Hospital admissions for Covid-19 more than doubled in a week, with 92 people admitted to Dutch hospitals for the coronavirus disease last week. That figure was up from 43 a week earlier, while the number of deaths linked to Covid-19 fell from 17 to 14.

For the second straight week, public health institute RIVM acknowledged at least a 50-percent increase in the number of people who tested positive for the SARS-CoV-2 novel coronavirus. Some 8,265 positive tests were recorded by the agency for the seven-day period which ended on Tuesday at 10 a.m., as opposed to 5,427 in the previous week, and 3,597 during the week before that.

That was 52 percent higher than a week earlier. At the same time, the percentage of people who tested positive for the virus rose from 2.8 percent to 3.9 percent.

Contact tracing identified how roughly two thousand people became infected last week. "More than half of them became infected at home," the RIVM said. "Interestingly, the number of people likely to have become infected at work and nursing homes is increasing."

The RIVM also noted that the basic reproduction (R) number of the virus rose again, this time from 1.17 to 1.38. This means that 100 people contagious with the virus will likely infect 138 others.

According to municipal health service GGD, 195,545 people showed up voluntarily for a coronavirus test last week, an increase of about 15 thousand from the previous week. Testing capacity was so strained that many regional services were unable to provide a test within 48 hours, while the Haaglanden region around The Hague and Delft said it was unable to complete source and contact tracing.

Over nine percent of those tested in the Haaglanden area have given a positive result, adding further stress to contact investigations. The regions of Amsterdam and Rotterdam-Rijnmond also showed an 8.2 percent rate of people testing positive.

The number of infected people who travelled to the Netherlands within two weeks of testing positive fell to 420. The RIVM said that 68 of them had recently arrived from Turkey, 61 had been in Germany, 59 spent time in France and 49 had visited Spain.

To date, 84,778 people in the Netherlands have tested positive for the coronavirus infection, with 12,315 patients having been admitted to hospitals for Covid-19. Some 6,258 people are known to have died from the coronavirus disease since the end of February.