ICU doctor tells Covid inquiry that rules must never again leave patients to die alone

Measures must never again become so strict that people die alone in care homes or hospitals as during the Covid-19 pandemic, said ICU physician Diederik Gommers of the Outbreak Management Team (OMT) during a hearing of the parliamentary Covid-19 inquiry committee in The Hague on Monday. The National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) also testified.

Gommers said restrictions in Dutch care homes during the pandemic prevented many elderly patients from being with family at the end of life. “You cannot die alone; that is not what you are put on this earth for,” he said. “We should never take these kinds of measures again,” he added.

He said the rules led to situations in which patients died without loved ones present, something he described as unacceptable under any circumstances. “It is very important that we say about these essential things: we never do this again,” he said.

Gommers also warned that the Dutch healthcare system remains vulnerable to renewed pressure on intensive care capacity unless staffing levels are increased. He said hospitals risk a repeat of the shortages seen during the early stages of the pandemic, when ICU units quickly reached capacity. He criticized proposals to set minimum ICU bed numbers by law, arguing that physical capacity is of limited value without sufficient trained staff to run it.

He described political pressure on the Outbreak Management Team during the second Covid-19 wave in 2020, saying advisory meetings were sometimes preceded by government discussions in a way that made outcomes feel effectively predetermined. “That gave us a very bad feeling,” he said.

“I felt we were being pressured, while we did not have authority over those decisions. I thought that was truly a political decision,” he said.

Separately, RIVM modeler Jacco Wallinga told the inquiry that early in the outbreak, Dutch researchers detected signals that the virus situation in Wuhan, China, was larger than official figures suggested.

He said the assessment came from analysis of data from local Chinese health services and other Asian countries. Wallinga stated that the indication became clearer when cases were also identified in Japan and Thailand in January 2020, with the pattern suggesting that the outbreak was likely significantly larger than reported.

Wallinga said the team used data from China, Thailand, and Singapore to model quarantine durations and infectious periods and to estimate what would happen if the virus spread to the Netherlands. He said the early scenario analyses were produced in January and February 2020.

He added that at the time it was still unclear whether the outbreak would develop into a global pandemic, despite reports of high mortality in China and uncertainty about how it would affect Dutch healthcare capacity.