Fear of a ‘Bergamo scenario’ shaped cabinet policy, former minister Schouten says

Fear of a repeat of the scenes seen in Bergamo, where hospitals in northern Italy overflowed and patients lay in corridors, left little room for other considerations during the Dutch coronavirus crisis, former minister Carola Schouten said.

Testifying before the parliamentary COVID-19 inquiry, Schouten said the prospect of intensive-care units reaching “code black” dominated the Rutte III cabinet’s decisions. The immediate pressure of infections and crowded hospitals repeatedly outweighed longer-term concerns, including loneliness among young people and older adults and the financial problems facing businesses that went bankrupt.

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We had to choose: accept that people would die or not? In an acute situation, the short term takes precedence over the long term, that is the honest answer.

The cabinet used models from the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment to justify measures including school, sports-club, shop and nursing-home closures, a curfew and, later, the coronavirus pass. Those decisions contributed to growing distrust of the government, Schouten acknowledged. She said she should have challenged that balance more sharply.

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The hospitals had hard data: so many infections, so many beds, so many staff. But you could not count loneliness.

“If a new pandemic breaks out, she said, decision-makers should account from day one for less tangible effects such as loneliness and distrust. Hospitals had hard figures for infections, beds and staff, she said, while loneliness could not be counted.

Schouten also questioned the certainty with which modellers predicted the number of infections each measure would prevent. If people no longer followed the rules, she said, such predictions became impossible. She added that critics of the measures were sometimes treated as one group, even though they included compliant young people who missed their friends, indebted business owners and people who did not want vaccination. They were “not all rioters.”

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They were really not all rioters.