Five years after first Covid-19 infection Netherlands is even less prepared for pandemic

Five years after the first coronavirus infection in the Netherlands, the country is even less prepared for a new pandemic than it was in 2020. There are even fewer intensive care beds available and funds for the “pandemic preparedness” plan have been cut, Parool reports.

The ICU capacity was the weakest link in the Netherlands’ handling of the coronavirus pandemic and was therefore decisive for how the virus was fought. The more crowded the ICUs were, the stricter the measures in society to prevent the spread of the virus.

When the first Covid-19 infection was confirmed in the Netherlands on 27 February 2020, exactly five years ago, the country had 1,150 beds in intensive care units. With great difficulty, that was increased to 1,700 beds at the peak, but the hospitals could only keep that up for a few days. According to the most recent count from June 2024, the Netherlands is now even worse off than in 2020 with 850 ICU beds operational.

Then-PVV parliamentarian and now Health Minister Fleur Agema hammered on the importance of increasing ICU capacity throughout the pandemic. “I keep asking about it in every debate because I have no explanation for it,” Agema said at the end of 2020. “I find it astonishing that this has not been arranged in three years and that we have half the number of ICUS of the European average.” The ICU capacity must be structurally increased, she proclaimed time and again.

Her predecessor Ernst Kuipers, Health Minister from 2022 to 2024, set up a “pandemic preparedness program” to do just that. It aimed for a permanent capacity of 1,700 ICU beds. But since the end of the pandemic, the trend has been downward, with around 100 fewer beds each year.

Just like during the pandemic, a shortage of nursing staff is the main obstacle. Due to the overexploitation of nurses during the pandemic, the capacity problem is now even greater than it was then. To get back to the 2020 level of 1,150 operational beds, experts say over 1,000 additional full-time nurses are required.

But despite her insistence on increasing ICU capacity as a parliamentarian, Agema is in no apparent hurry to do so as Minister of Public Health. Under Agema’s responsibility, the plans for pandemic preparedness are being cut and no new programs are being prepared.

She is also no longer speaking of “pandemic preparedness,” but of “resilience,” shifting the focus from only on pathogens to also include war or attacks. “So we actually no longer talk about it because that package has been cut,” Agema said about pandemic preparedness in an interview with Blckbx last month. “I have come up with a new package that contains roughly the same content but is formulated somewhat more broadly.” The direction for that does not fall to her Ministry but to the National Coordinator for Counterterrorism and Security (NCTV).

The Dutch Safety Board warned that the budget cuts will leave the Netherlands unprepared for another pandemic. “The GGDs in the Netherlands will not be able to realize the necessary expansion of capacity, the modeling of infectious disease outbreaks cannot be strengthened, and the scaling up of ICU capacity cannot be achieved.”

Anja Chreijer, who was head of infectious disease at the Amsterdam GGD during the pandemic and is now affiliated with the Pandemic and Disaster Preparedness Center (PDPC), shares these concerns. “Due to the cutbacks, everything has now come to a standstill and the lessons we learned during the pandemic are in danger of not sticking,” she told Parool.