AMSTERDAM - During the seven-day period ending at 10 a.m. on Tuesday a total of 82,340 people in the Netherlands were registered by public health agency RIVM as having tested positive for the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus infection. It was the third week in a row, and the first full week after entering a lockdown, that the number of new coronavirus infections was higher among every age group monitored by the Netherlands.
"The advance of the coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) in the Netherlands is continuing unabated. It is too early to see the effects of the lockdown that was announced on December 15," the RIVM said in a statement. It said that 509,644 people were tested for the viral infection last week by municipal health service GGD, up over eight percent.
While initially the results appeared to be 41 percent higher than the week before, about six thousand of those whose positive tests were reported by the agency over the past week should actually have been included the previous week, but an IT error at municipal health service GGD prevented that from happening. That meant that the real increase was closer to 19 percent.
The new data means that the moving average for new daily infections rose on Tuesday to 11,763, the twentieth day in a row where that figure has risen. Overall, an estimated 13.6 percent of all people who self-reported for a coronavirus test were given a positive diagnosis, up from 12.1 percent the week earlier.
The basic reproduction (R) number remained nearly unchanged at 1.25, meaning that 100 people contagious with the virus will infect 125 others. An estimated 122 thousand people were contagious with the viral infection at the start of the month, 35 percent higher than towards the end of November.
The regular care wards at hospitals took on 17 percent more coronavirus patients last week, equaling 1,549 in total. They also moved 287 Covid-19 patients into intensive care during that time, an increase of 25 percent. On Monday, acute care expert Ernst Kuipers predicted this figure would continue to rise through the end of the month, with the Dutch government expecting a peak at some point in January.
For the better part of ten months, the hospital system has treated 29,212 people with the SARS-CoV-2 infection in regular care. An estimated 6,274 Covid-19 patients were treated in intensive care, with the ICU survival rate at about 72 percent.
According to the RIVM, another 472 deaths were also linked to Covid-19 last week, reflecting a 19-percent increase. Some 10,633 people are known to have died from Covid-19 since the end of February, though in reality that figure was likely to be much higher as many people were not quickly diagnosed with the illness at the start of the pandemic.
On Monday, the Netherlands crossed 700 thousand diagnosed infections since the beginning of the pandemic. That rose to 710,683 with Tuesday's data.
Infections per capita rose in all age groups
The coronavirus infection was most prevalent among the population of people aged 13 to 17, with those from 18 to 24 ranking second. An average of over 717 people in their late teens was diagnosed with the infection last week for every 100 thousand in that age group.
From children up through the elderly, the infection was more widely found in all age groups last week. That's the third week in a row where all age groups showed a higher per capita rate of infection.