Source of Covid infection increasingly difficult to find: report

Health service GGD is having a harder and harder time tracking down the source of coronavirus infections in the Netherlands. Last week the health service identified a possible source in only a third of the 16,500 infections, NRC reports.

In June, when the Netherlands had about 21 thousand infections per week, the GGD was still able to identify a potential source in more than half the cases, according to the newspaper. Health Minister Hugo de Jonge previously called source and contact tracing essential in stopping potential coronavirus outbreaks.

According to public health institute RIVM, source and contact tracing is getting harder because society is opening up more and more. People have more contacts and therefore have a harder time keeping track of every single one of them.

"We see that people increasingly do not know where they contracted the coronavirus," Susan van den Hof, head of the RIVM's center for epidemiology and surveillance of infectious diseases, said to the newspaper. "That's what you get when you open up society more and you meet more people you don't know well, then you don't know whether they have had a positive test."