Netherlands remains red on Europe’s coronavirus risk map
Update 14:50 - Story updated when ECDC was released
The entire Netherlands will be red on the map of coronavirus cases in Europe in the coming week. That is the second highest warning color. The number and percentage of positive tests are falling, but not enough to drop to orange. That could happen int he coming weeks.
The health service ECDC, the European counterpart of the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, publishes the coronavirus map every Thursday. The service looks at the number of confirmed infections and the percentage of positive tests in the two previous calendar weeks. The map has four colors. From low to high these are green, orange, red and dark red.
Friesland has overtaken Flevoland and has now become the country's biggest source of infections. Over 1,800 Friesland residents tested positive in the past two weeks, equivalent to 277 for every 100,000 people. That is 9 percent more than on last week's map. A slight increase can be seen in Limburg and Zeeland and the number of positive tests remains the same in Drenthe. In the rest of the country, the number of new cases is falling compared to the previous calculation. The decrease is greatest in Flevoland and Overijssel at over 9 percent.
Improvement can be seen in other countries. In Greece, the last regions have gone from dark red to red. Portugal and Flanders have gone from red to orange. This also applies to Tuscany in Italy and large parts of France. In Spain, a region is green for the firs time in months.
In Central Europe, on the other hand, the number of positive tests is increasing. Western Slovenia has gone to dark red. Romania is now all red, while last week the country was mostly orange with one green region. In Austria, more federal states are on red. The whole of Slovakia is now orange.
Countries use the ECDC map to determine their policies. When the Netherlands turned dark red in July, this prompted countries like Germany and France to introduce stricter rules for Dutch people who wanted to cross the border.
Reporting by ANP