Covid-19 ICU cases down for 5th straight day; Vaccine target almost met

Hospital intensive care units in the Netherlands were treating 757 people for Covid-19, patient coordination office LCPS said. It was the fifth day in a row that the ICU total has fallen, with total hospital admissions for the coronavirus disease also down 13 percent over the past week.

"According to our forecasts, total hospital occupancy will slowly decline further in the coming period," the LCPS wrote in a statement.

The ICU total was at its lowest point since April 6 after a single day decrease of ten. It held above eight hundred for roughly three weeks, and the total has been above seven hundred since April 2.

There were another 1,730 people being treated for the disease in regular care, a net increase of 62. That brought the Covid-19 hospital total up two percent to 2,487. Despite the increase, the combined total was six percent lower compared to a week ago.

Over the past seven days, daily admissions for the disease fell from 308 to 268, a 13-percent decrease. Members of the Outbreak Management Team said the figure should fall below 245 before any further lockdown restrictions are eased. That would be a 20 percent drop from data released on May 2. The average number of ICU admissions, included in the daily admissions data, has already shown a 20 percent drop over the past week to 40.

Coronavirus 7-day average unchanged in a week

Meanwhile, public health agency RIVM said that 5,910 more people tested positive for the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. That brought the seven-day rolling average down to 7,105, almost unchanged from a week ago.

A week ago, the Cabinet postponed taking a decision on reducing lockdown restrictions due to the number of coronavirus infections nationally. Over the past two months, there has also been a national trend showing that fewer people are getting tested for the viral infection.

Simultaneously, a higher rate of them are testing positive, with the positivity rate reaching 12.2 percent for the seven days ending on Saturday. That shows a trend towards the highest point since early January.

Over 811 thousand vaccines administered last week

Healthcare workers administered an estimated 115,799 Covid-19 vaccine doses on Sunday, the RIVM said. That means that about 811,457 doses were provided over the past calendar week, about 3,600 fewer than anticipated.

To date, 6,462,498 vaccine doses have been administered, of which about 1.4 million were a person's second vaccine shot.