Further corona measures (Or: Curfew announced)

A curfew has been announced from 20:30 to 04:30, starting either Saturday or Sunday depending on a final vote by the Dutch parliament. For the moment the curfew will last until 9 February. Some of the exceptions to the curfew include essential workers (who have a signed declaration from their employer), persons seeking medical assistance for a person or an animal, caretakers and meal delivery workers with a declaration from their employer. You can also let your dog out, but you need to do it alone and the dog must be leashed.

Coronavirus in the Netherlands: What you need to know (January 20) from dutchnews.nl

Oh, and you see how I said the curfew doesn’t apply to meal delivery workers? Marktplaats bans sales of delivery worker apparel ahead of curfew from nltimes.nl. Markplaats is like a Dutch eBay. Apparently people were already selling (and buying) clothes to make it look like they had a legitimate reason to be outside during the curfew.

Other measures include:

• all flights to the United Kingdom, South Africa and all South American countries will be banned until required quarantine procedures can be put into place, which might take up to four weeks
• all travelers by boat and plane must have taken a fast test within four hours of their flight departing, in addition to the previously required PCR test within 72 hours
• all travelers by boat and plane are required to quarantine for 10 days, but they can take a test after 5 days
• only one house guest over the age of 13 is allowed per 24 hours. Previously 2 guests were allowed.
• only 50 guests are allowed by a funeral (instead of the previous 100 guests)

The goal of the extra measures is to prepare for the scenario where the “British” variant is more dominant in the Netherlands, to prevent the situation that is currently happening in the United Kingdom. Another goal is to force the number of cases down even faster to allow schools to hopefully re-open on 8 February.

In other news:

• dinner today was sauerkraut (English Wikipedia), made by Marco’s mom. Very tasty – thank you!
• Marco and I forgot to take photos of the sauerkraut because we were busy watching the US inauguration of Joe Biden on CNN International. Fun fact as told by Marco: here in the Netherlands, CNN became widespread in the Netherlands during the Gulf War in the early 1990s. After the war ended the channel was still offered by most Dutch television providers, through today.