The corona thermometer is at position 1. The ICU occupancy with Covid patients is 0.5 percent of all ICU beds. BA.2.86 variants are mainly found in sewage water. This can be read on the last updated version of the Coronavirus Dashboard at the end of March. How many more people would have read it?
The dashboard has now been stored in the online archive of the Ministry of Health. The corona dashboard is closed on Tuesday, April 2. Almost four years after the site was created to inform the public about the current corona situation.
Minister Hugo de Jonge (CDA), then of Health, announced it in June 2020 as the latest weapon in the fight against corona. Criticism immediately came. If all meters were in the green, would citizens still adhere to the measures? Measurements from the sewer also appeared on the dashboard, but the RIVM immediately warned that it was not known whether they were a good indicator of the degree of contamination. A month after the launch, a PhD student calculated that the RIVM received more reports than were on the dashboard. Test results were received days or weeks later due to congestion at the GGDs, which meant that the reality was usually different from what the dashboard reported.
professor of risk communicationDanielle Timmermans You have to give meaning to numbers
With the corona dashboard, the word ‘signal value’ also appeared: numbers of infections or admissions above which measures were introduced. From September 2020, the dashboard also showed whether the situation in individual safety regions qualified as “vigilant”, “worrisome” or “serious”, the idea was that drivers could also intervene locally. But by then the numbers were rising so quickly nationally that such a fine-grained approach no longer made much sense.
Before the year was over, it was announced that the corona dashboard, with the ‘road map’, could be thrown in the bulk waste. A crisis management advisor wrote on the opinion page of NRC about the government’s chaotic, reactive approach. The corona dashboard symbolized this for him.
The corona dashboard probably provided the best information available to the public. But it became clear again that it was not perfect when vaccination started. The dashboard showed more vaccinations than had actually been distributed, it was discovered NRC in February 2021. At first it was due to the calculation method, but later it turned out that injections that remained on the doctor’s shelf were also included. When people gradually tested less and positive tests no longer had to be reported, the dashboard lost its relevance. Virus particles in sewage water were also published by the RIVM.
Handy for drivers
The dashboard was visited more than 750,000,000 times in almost four years. Does that prove success? It was mainly administrators, healthcare workers, journalists and event organizers who used the site. And self-proclaimed corona experts. But the goal was to inform the public and show what figures the policy was based on. “It was less suitable for that,” says Daniëlle Timmermans, professor of risk communication at Amsterdam UMC. “Numbers are not yet information. If you read what the ‘R’ [het reproductiegetal] can you translate that to your own situation and do you know what to do? Probably not. You have to give meaning to numbers, so that citizens know whether it is wise to go to a busy café, for example.”
Although the corona dashboard did not achieve its goal, the idea of a dashboard with epidemiological figures does not have to be thrown out, according to Timmermans. “It is important to create and test a good model now, and to involve citizens in the design. To see how you can get people to make well-considered choices based on the figures.”
To share
Email the editor
