Netherlands doing better than they say

Yesterday Reuters reported that the Netherlands was being hit by a spike in COVID-19 cases. They are, but we find that the Netherlands reproduction number for the disease has gone under that crucial redline R=1.0. They had a Reff spike from late July all the way through August and our predictive model was warning of a coming case spike as it played out.

We can expect daily cases to start falling away in the next 10-14 days as behaviour or policy changes there take effect. This is the problem of using daily cases as the trigger for policy or behaviour change. The COVID-19 lags between infection, virus shedding, symptom onset (or not) and recovery mean the daily case measure is a rear vision mirror. Using our Reff model would have led to a trigger to make policy change in the first week of August. Our Reff model looks forward. See the trends from our covid19.closeassociate.com site for every country in the world. (Next: the United Kingdom and that's another story.)