The Netherlands is back in lockdown. There seems to be few options, if the Danish numbers are a harbinger of what lies ahead. De Volkskrant looked at the Danish data.

Denmark, like the United Kingdom, is slightly ahead in the distribution of the omikron variant. They are already seeing a rise in hospital admissions. In the past three weeks, nearly one hundred patients have been admitted with the Omicron variant. But on Friday, there were 20 sudden admissions for Covid, and on Saturday, there were usually quieter, 19 more cases, 0.6 percent of all Danish patients with omicron infection were referred to hospital. In the delta variant this was 1.5 per cent. But the virus currently spreads mainly among young people, and if it ends up also among the elderly, that percentage is likely to increase.

If you start from these numbers in the Netherlands, there will already be sixty hospital admissions per day, and given that the number of infections is rapidly multiplying, that number rises to hundreds of admissions per day. And the Netherlands is worse off: only 9 per cent have been boosted, while 24 per cent of the population in Denmark has already had a third chance. So most of the elderly and frail are better protected there, but not here. Moreover, our hospitals are already much fuller than they were in Denmark.

So all the neighboring countries are actually better off than we are.