MANAGING EXPECTATIONS
Just as Olav Mol regularly explodes when a driver returns to the track after a pit stop in a position that is totally surprising to Olav, the RIVM shakes to its foundations when the flu mortality is higher than expected year after year. And really: every year.
Now let's say you're a facility services manager and this graph shows your energy costs. Year after year, costs break through your forecast – and yet you never adjust your forecast. In fact, you don't even try to do anything about it, you just have a huge hole in your budget every year.
"Gosh, this year again more than expected, bad huh?" And back to the order of the day, copy/paste the budget for next year. Your boss doesn't understand it anyway, after all, that's why he hired you.
A company that is run like this will go under at some point, there is no other way. There will come a year when it is suddenly no longer possible to cope with it. If you are also cut back in the meantime, the stretch goes out. You keep your mouth shut because otherwise you get "couldn't you have come up with that a little earlier?".
The RIVM also regularly reports "a higher mortality than expected". Now there is a higher mortality rate every flu season than the RIVM expects. After all, that's what the term "excess mortality" was coined for. Then RIVM does not have to adjust expectations.
If you look at previous years, you would have expected this mortality.
The bandwidth that RIVM traditionally expects is indicated by dotted lines in the graph. You wonder how professionals can work like this. (By the way, the graph shows several countries, not just NL. The picture is the same; perhaps it is an international-virological way of looking at figures.)
What could RIVM have done with the annual underestimation they have called "excess mortality"? Well, trying to reduce the chance of heavy infections and group infections, for example: how about a better indoor climate? That could have considerably flattened those death mountains in the annual landscape. And if it doesn't help, it doesn't hurt either: then people sit in clean air all day in the office or at a concert, that can't be very bad.
Let's not mention the other healthcare institutions: the WHO, but also in NL: controlling, supervising, quality monitoring, they all exist, are in large buildings with civil servants, doctors, labs and I don't know what all employed, entire HR and Communication departments – and they have all looked away.
I hope you will think about this again when the RIVM comes up with "a higher mortality than expected".
