'Corona policy is inhumane,' says Clinical Ethicist Dr. Erwin Kompanje (video)

This concerns the Netherlands. I don't know if the word 'corona policy' is correct. It seems right to me that there is no policy at all, but that from a kind of panic, virologists, RIVM etc were suddenly blindly followed by the government. Now that they don't know anymore, it seems impossible for the politicians to bring the situation back to normal in a few clear steps. Small steps are announced very frenetically in a schoolmasterly manner, De Jonge talks about 'apps' and 'dashboards' and meanwhile unemployment is shooting up and economic growth is falling. I don't see any policies. Only panicked fiddling and incompetence in execution.

I completely agree with this doctor.

Corona is a new disease and no one knew what the best treatment was and how it would spread. It seems that there simply was not and is not enough capacity to treat people with a serious illness, so choices have to be made. Hopefully we can learn lessons from the past months and it looks like we just have to spend more money if we want to help everyone.

My mother (93) lives in a nursing home in Eindhoven. THE social moment of the day is dinner with all the other residents. That has been stopped for weeks now due to Covid-19. She can now come pick up and eat the food in her apartment. On the way to et restauarnat and back, she sees some fellow residents, but she has to keep her distance and everyone is frightened. Visits by children and grandchildren are also prohibited.
My sister has a key to the side door where there is no 'security'. She visits my mother for coffee and a few groceries (mainly for breakfast and fruit) a few times a week. My mom is just happy.
I am sure that if you ask my mother if she wants to live another 5 years under the covid regime or 2 or 3 years with all the freedoms before the crisis, she will not have to think twice: back to normal, not the 'new' normal. Dr. Erwin is absolutely right.

Should the approach have been different? From the start I seriously wondered whether all the stringent measures in the case of Covid-19 were really necessary. In addition to following the news and reading articles, every day until the end of March, I hit the streets, took public transport to work in Bangkok and the number of infections was virtually zero until the Thai foreign workers returned from Seoul. But I was a voice crying in the wilderness. Now I find myself in the undesirable company of the PVV and FvD, who first agreed with the measures (for the closure of schools, for example) but have suddenly changed their opinion now that there are more protests against government policy. They are not against because the policy needs to be changed, but for reasons of freedom and the absence of a legal basis for the stringent measures.
Could the approach have been different? Certainly. The fact that the corona virus was new and that politicians did not know what to do is a gross misrepresentation of what politicians are supposed to do, which is to lead solutions to the problems facing the country. If they're just looking after the store, my cousin might as well run the country. And - curiously enough - there have been enough unexpected crises in the Netherlands that politicians could handle: bomb attacks, murders of acquaintances, train and plane hijackings, shooting down of a plane with Dutch people on board, etc. the biggest mistakes of the corona policy is (still) that everything is subordinated to the opinions and advice of the medical sector, and then a limited part of that sector (virologists). it has become a kind of belief on which no criticism is possible and not accepted, until recently. A video with an interview with 2 critical American doctors has now been removed from Youtube for the second time. (because of the fake news qualifier)
If one would have studied chaos theory a bit, one would know that nothing new in this world is completely new, but largely follows patterns that were already there. “Initially, chaos theory is a scientific principle that describes the unpredictability of systems, such as weather patterns, ecosystems and water flows. While such systems exhibit random chaotic behavior, they can be defined by mathematical formulas and are not nearly as chaotic as one might think.” This works with algorithms that are also used by FB, for example. Based on search behavior and giving comments and likes before noon, an algorithm can determine how stressed you are that day. The corona virus follows certain patterns that are revealed by researcher de Hond in various interviews. Nothing is done at all with this progressive knowledge, based on research. Still not.