1. What is the benefit of 1.5 meters?
The leading scientific journal scalpel NSHe put the evidence on a scale last year and came to the following conclusion: Every meter you are away from someone causes a ‘significant reduction’ in the risk of infection. Roughly, according to the British Journal, the chance of injury is about five times lower at one meter and ten times smaller at two meters. It was then Medicare Minister Bruno Bruins who roughly announced a third point in the March 15, 2020, press conference, which also stated that schools and the catering industry would be closed. “We also ask all Dutch people to keep an appropriate distance from each other wherever possible, including when shopping for groceries. You can use about 1.5 meters as a guideline.”
Where the Mexican flu in 2009 was still all about staying away from flu patients, now for the first time in history it’s being advised to stay away from healthy people. Despite major studies showing that 1.5m works, there are also other reputable researchers, such as those from Oxford University, who have found that this is not always the case. There are also cases where the coronavirus spreads through the air via tiny droplets (aerosols). These tiny droplets can travel up to 8 metres.
2. What difference does keeping distance make?
If we allow researchers scalpel You might think, the chance of injury “strongly depends on how much distance you keep.” Near a corona patient, the risk of infection is 12.8 percent. At a distance of at least 1 meter, the pollution risk is reduced by 10.2 percentage points. Your chance of getting an infection after that is still 2.6 percent. And every meter you go further, the percentage drops in half. The fact that 1.5 meters is a little far from the blue is evidenced by the fact that the rule is interpreted differently everywhere. Where Italy and France thought 1 meter was enough, the Netherlands and our neighboring countries Belgium and Germany chose 1.5 meters and the United States 6 feet, or more than 1 meter and 82 centimeters. With two metres, Spain was quite on the safe side.
3. What happened elsewhere where distancing was cancelled?
Denmark already moved from two meters to one meter in May 2020, but on September 10, as one of the first countries, it completely abandoned keeping distance. The Scandinavian country is considered a pilot country for Europe in the Corona pandemic. In March 2020, it was one of the first European countries to announce a severe lockdown, which means it was also the first country to open slowly in May 2020. The Danes are now the first in terms of vaccination coverage, and more than two weeks ago, as one of the first, they threw the last measures Corona at sea.
Things have improved in Denmark since the release. Shortly before the cancellation of the latest Corona measures, there were still about 450 new cases of corona per day, and about 125 Danes were in hospital, of whom 25 were in the international centre. Currently, more than three hundred Danes are tested for corona daily, and there are ninety corona patients in Danish hospitals, of whom less than twenty are in the international centre. This is mainly due to the high vaccination coverage, with 84.5 percent of everyone over the age of 12 years fully vaccinated.
By comparison: Denmark has a population of 5.9 million, which is a third of the population of the Netherlands. At the moment, there are about 1,800 Dutch people who are tested positive daily, and there are less than six hundred patients with the virus in Dutch hospitals, 185 of whom are in the center. This in itself is not surprising, because Denmark intervened earlier, and did not have the ‘Dancing with Jansen’ wave in the summer, where many young people were infected when they did not have antibodies after vaccination, but went out for walks. In the Netherlands, far fewer people are fully vaccinated. The meter stops at 79.6 percent of all people over the age of 12. So there is no guarantee – if the distance between you and you is no longer here – the numbers will drop as quickly as the Danes.
4. How important is it for you to stand by someone who is vaccinated or not?
The degree of transmission of the coronavirus between people depends on the amount of respiratory complaints and how long the virus has spread, the Health Board analyzed in May. If you’ve been with someone in a small space for too long, you’re more likely to pick them up than if they were short. People with severe respiratory complaints are more contagious than people with mild complaints. The chance of getting an infection is closely related to whether or not someone has been vaccinated. The most widely used vaccine in the Netherlands, the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, prevents on average 80 percent of infections. This is evidenced by a large British study on the efficacy of vaccines for the delta variant, which is currently the most common.
This means that if, say, ten people get infected at a party, that number will drop to two with just Pfizer’s vaccination. At the same party with the AstraZenecage vaccination, not ten infections will occur, but on average you will occur a little over three. In the Netherlands, source and contact research has enabled people who have tested positive to identify the source of infection. This data shows that Dutch people who have ignored corona shots are more likely to infect others than people who have been vaccinated.
But whoever gets the most from the shot is the one who gets it. The chance of ending up in the hospital as a full-fledged corona virus is twenty times lower than that of an unvaccinated person. For example, RIVM calculated this summer after conducting research on more than 15,000 people. The risk of ending up with IC as a fully vaccinated person is 33 times lower. Because other types of Janssen and Moderna vaccines are given more often, it is difficult to accurately determine their effectiveness. What we already know: The chance of hospitalization and IC admission for people younger than 70 who have had Pfizer’s injections is no less than fifty times that of unvaccinated people.