Covid ICU total drops to 20-month low but coronavirus R-Value jumps higher
This article was updated.
There were fewer than 40 patients with Covid-19 in intensive care units for the first time since September 2020, the LCPS said on Tuesday. The ICU patient total was 39, down from 56 a week earlier. Another 620 patients were in regular care wards, down 14 percent since last Tuesday.
Preliminary figures from the RIVM showed that 259 people with the disease were admitted into care the past seven days. That was 28 percent lower compared to the finalized figure of 362 from the week before. Weekly intensive care admissions fell from 31 to 21.
A total of 10,007 people tested positive for the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus since last Tuesday morning, the RIVM said. That reflected a 6 percent reduction from nearly 10,600 infections the previous week.
The number of people who showed up at a GGD facility for a test fell by 4 percent to 15,466. About 42 percent having produced a positive self-test before contacting the health service.
The latest data gave reason to believe that the decrease in new infections could be slowing down, and might begin to rise. The model from the RIVM showed that the basic reproduction (R) value surged to 0.95. That was an increase from 0.72 the previous week, which pushed the figure to its highest point since early March.
The current R-value suggests that 100 people contagious with the virus on April 25 infected 95 others, who then spread the infection to another 90 people. They then passed the coronavirus on to 86 others.
When the R-value is below 1.00, the expectation is that infections will fall. However that reduction slows as the figure gets closer to 1.00. Should it rise above that point, there is a higher likelihood that infections in the Netherlands will increase.
The last time the figure was above 1.00 was on March 4, leading to hundreds of thousands of diagnosed infections in the Netherlands. That then resulted in over a thousand more weekly Covid-19 hospitalizations than what the RIVM divulged over the previous seven days.
Despite the higher number of hospitalizations in the first quarter of the year, the intensive care totals remained low compared to other infection waves in previous years.
A random sample of those who tested positive last week showed that 39 percent believe they were infected at from someone else in their household. Another 14.5 percent said a party was the likely setting of infection, while 13 percent thought infection occurred at a home visit.
Fewer than 12 percent linked their infection to a cafe visit, while about 11 percent thought it was due to travel. An estimated 9 percent of infections occurred at the workplace.