Dutch Covid hospital total hits five-week high; Infections average nears 87,000, a likely record

Hospitals in the Netherlands were treating 1,580 patients with Covid-19 on Tuesday afternoon, 6 percent more than the previous day. The hospitalized total was at its highest point since January 5, over a month ago.

Among the patients were 226 people placed in intensive care units, a net increase of 12 in a day after accounting for new admissions, discharges, and deaths. The other 1,354 patients were in regular care wards, a net increase of 75.

While the regular care total was at its highest point this year, the ICU figure has not shown a similar upward trend. The ICU total has remained below 250 for two weeks, and has held relatively close to a 100-day low.

Dutch hospitals admitted 229 patients with the disease in the past 24 hours, 19 of whom were sent to intensive care. That brought the seven-day average down slightly to 191, which was about 11 percent higher compared to last Tuesday.

Meanwhile, corrected figures from the RIVM put the average number of daily coronavirus infections at 86,933, likely a record for the Netherlands. The new seven-day average was more than two-thirds higher than the average of 32,354 reported on January 16, when the institute and the GGD municipal health services first started struggling with a substantial backlog of data due to the rapid pace in which infection numbers grew.

On Tuesday, they introduced a plan to eliminate the main cause of the bottleneck. The country’s primary coronavirus test sites can now upload data directly to the RIVM, before sending figures to the association that organizes all branches of the GGD.

That resulted in the RIVM reporting that nearly 400,000 new coronavirus infections were registered between Monday in Tuesday morning, though about 315,000 of them were diagnosed between January 17 and February 7. The latest update showed that the backlog of data may have been far worse than the RIVM said in previous statements about the issue. On Monday, it said that about 191,000 infections had yet to be counted.

The latest figures from the RIVM made it clear which municipalities were most affected by underreporting through Tuesday morning. The new data added 11,731 new positive infections to Amsterdam’s total, followed by Tilburg (9,513), Rotterdam (9,382), Almere (7,602), Arnhem (7,501), Ede (7,071), The Hague (6,844), Den Bosch (6,082), Utrecht (5,921), and Eindhoven (5,095).