oa ‘Help ik ben besmet’

‘Help I am infected’. The illusion of an intelligent Dutch lockdown

On March 16, 2020, Prime Minister Rutte announced that the government was forced to switch from a strategy of local containment of outbreaks to a national strategy of maximum control. A week later, the first ‘intelligent’ national lockdown became a reality. In this contribution I will show that in the historical interaction between disease, health and social environment, connections are constantly made and severed between facts, opinions and expectations. As part of this historical process, the meanings attached to ‘infectious disease X’ are subject to change. I show how the Netherlands’ handling of the corona pandemic, and consequently the public health challenges, changed over time. Curfews and riots would erupt over the restrictions within the context of social amplification of conspiracy theories about the pandemic. At the same time there was a strong belief in a technological fix, with a magic bullet that would eliminate the virus. But Covid-19 turned out to be a fast-mutating virus that transformed continuously in response to human-environment interactions.