Now that the Netherlands has a new health minister in person of Ernst Kuipers (replacing Hugo de Jonge), it's also having a new approach of presenting apocalyptic infection numbers, and that's by graphs. Like pie charts and Powerpoint presentation.
To give some credit to the new minister, we have to acknowledge that he rightfully said last year that the curfew imposed in the Netherlands, at that point in time, had no effect on hospital admissions.
“The calculation was that it would reduce 10 percent. If you look at the course of hospital admissions over time, we saw no effect whatsoever during the introduction or the postponement ”, says Ernst Kuipers on the talk show Beau (RTL).
What was the paid price of such an idiotic measure that lasted 3 full months?
More than 95,000 fines were handed out for the violation, it was announced on Thursday, which has also resulted in a lot of extra work for the police.
So wasting resources for measures that don't matter. Three months in a row.
But let's take a look now at the predictions, at the models that have been used to support the measures and all the circus around this pandemic:
As you can easily noticed, the predicted numbers are not only slightly off, but they are completely on some other planet. They anticipated 1500 of ICU admissions; today hardly 400 are in this situation (almost 4 times less!).
How they're explaining such a fuck up?! Quirine ten Bosch, epidemiologist and infectious disease modeler at Wageningen University, says that the measures took effect a week earlier than the model was based on and the model assumed that omikron is just as sickening as delta.
That means the information available at that point in time, about the new version Omicron, that is hardly as deadly as the previous one, was ignored. Why they predicted that Omicron will be the same as Delta, when the last year showed clearly that the new variants are dropping in intensity (as hospital admissions and death) ? Today this model is completely outdated. And obviously so called measures meant no difference one week or later implemented.
But still this sort of wrong models are used today to justify more measures. They will never admit that they were wrong.
Want more proof of this? Let's take a look at the latest press conference (14.01.2022) of the greatest prime minister of the Netherlands, Mark Rutte. The one with around 20% of the votes. The one that took almost 10 months to form a government. Politics are hard...
Rutte is currently under a lot of pressure from businesses that are forcibly closed and on the verge of bankruptcy, and from the support in population which dropped dramatically over the last months. People started to ask themselves why after 2 jabs and a booster they still cannot go back to normal life, like our neighbours in Germany or Belgium. So, he senses that it's still to backup a little bit, but not everything at once. So he's undoing half of the lockdown - we're still pretty much in the same situation as before.
But then, in a hugely hypocritical move, he admits:
Nevertheless, taking such a step is responsible, Rutte said, because of the impact of the current measures on society. ‘We are taking a risk because we have to do sport to stay healthy, because two in three youngsters are feeling lonely, and the lockdown is damaging our health as well,’ he said.
No shit ?! These things happened since the beginning of the pandemic, and they were more than obvious even last year. So you're telling us now, that you start seeing the same obvious things? How slow can you be? Or better say, how hypocrite? (well, as much as a politician can be these days, right?).
But that's the only moment of damage control. He continues to blow up his credibility by talking non-sense. How much non-sense?
Reopening shops, higher education institutes and fitness centres will lead to a sharp rise in coronavirus cases, possibly up to 80,000 a day, prime minister Mark Rutte told reporters on Friday evening.
It's certain: "they will lead". 80.000 infections per day! It will be such a dramatic change? If we're talking into consideration that little has changed, it makes absolutely no sense. Because models, you know. Like the one above.
What's the current situation? Official numbers point out to around 31.000 cases per day (but this is past the peak, with no noticeable rise in the last weeks). And how many in the ICUs? Around 20. Not 2000, not 200, but 20! If you fire up you calculator, you'll find out that means a percentage of 0,0006% from infections.
So yeah, models and predictions, and politicians in a dangerous mix. This mix, as shown above, is diverging more and more from the reality, making everyone miserable and dividing people. There are some that stubbornly still believe that the government knows what it's doing, and has everything under control, but most of us are sick and tired of this shit. Voices all over the world started to rise, and ask questions and ask to more accountability of the ones in charge. We still have to fight the mask and vaccines mandates, but the movement already started to brew. And not even the fake change of heart in the political class conferences will later make a difference.
