so, what's your take on it two weeks later?
Pretty much the same, although I do admit there is a (small) spike now, but those are not the young people that got infected two weeks ago!
I'll explain my point of view.
Firstly, still no big pressure on ICU capacity...and definitely not a rise in deaths here. Headlines here will try to tell you something else, even counting 20 deaths from April in one day last week because they weren't registered yet. Papers went nuts...with headlines such as: "Hope we all wake up now, 35 deaths in one day"...in reality it was 20 from April and 10 from the whole week and 5-ish from the day before. Off course a rectification is a much smaller part of their website the day after.
It's still very much a casedemic right now here in my eyes, influenced by the (flawed) PCR tests. Everyday more positive tests...but those are people that are able to get in the car...drive to a test location and get tested. It says nothing about if someone is sick or contagious or not, not even talking about false positives. And while I see what you're pointing at.. (new measures in the Netherlands because of some pressure on the hospitals, again I won't deny that fact)....there's a lot of discussion here about those measures and if they are justified. The pressure on the hospitals is not any bigger than in a regular flu season September/October and nothing compared with march/April. A handfull of people above 80 years old dying because of a flu virus isn't new. Neither is moving patients from one hospital to the other because of the flu season....however it's all about Covid fear porn now.
I stand with my point that we should have had differentiated measures for people under 70 and people above 70. Preferably right away..but at least by now we should have learned that we cannot lock everyone up because a really small group of people is dying. And medication got better, so within that small group even less people are dying. If we had a differentiated approach the younger generation that apparently caught Covid during their holidays would have not spread it in that older age group. Instead...our government, just like most governments are choosing the hammer and the dance like you said. And during both "the dance" and "the hammer" they still let those two groups (vulnerable and non-vulnerable) interact and come together without any additional measures such as ventilation or facemasks.
After this is all said and done...I'm afraid we will see the hammer and the dance was the wrong approach. We are letting the weak and vulnerable die in phases in between lockdowns right now. So this second wave (and the third..and the fourth) will be small bumps compared to march April.
Our government (and probably other governments) will say: "look we prevented it from becoming a big wave again", but that's bullshit.
I am not trying to be stubborn or in some form of Covid-denyal...I see what's happening here and in the rest of Europe.
I'm only talking about the dutch approach here. And I'm just looking at the death rate here, compared to regular flu deaths (we have 0 this year...because they are all counted as Covid-deaths), I'm looking at newspaper articles about pressure in hospitals in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019..but now it's all part of the strategy to keep the people afraid for Covid. It's not the people that were able to go to a test location and get tested two weeks ago that are now in hospitals, it's their parents, grandparents or the old people they come across in supermarkets. And that is something that the government could have done something about. Instead, the hammer is coming again in the Netherlands...and it will be devastating for the economy, mental health and society as a whole.
