No masks needed as Amsterdam's Red Light District prepares to reopen

It was a surprise to everyone – especially sex workers – when Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte announced that from July 1 they could return to work.

Of all of the “contact” professions, this was dogged with most concern in the Netherlands, which is now reopening after seeing daily corona deaths fall to single figures. The country has had the biggest percentage drop in weekly cases of 45 countries, according to one analysis, and this week announced a major relaxation of its “intelligent” lockdown.

Sex workers, often unable to access government support because of how they are registered, have been keen to restart work. Unions had even sent the government their own protocol of measures from “don’t shake hands” to banning positions in the client’s “moist breath zone”.

“It’s a contact job like the hairdresser and masseur, and so they need to ask in advance if [clients] have any symptoms,” said Rutte in a ‘final’ corona press conference. “We asked for detailed advice about which positions were possible and which weren’t from the RIVM public health institute, but there was no further explanation.”

In the red light district in Amsterdam this weekend, window brothels are being spruced up ready for work. The Red Light United union expects sex workers to wear gloves and avoid oral sex, and André van Dorst, director of the VER union for relaxation businesses, told The Sunday Telegraph safety would come first: “There are already public health institute hygiene protocols, which were no problem to introduce in the industry and are in general complied with. The same thing will happen with corona because nobody trusts this virus – everyone is in safety mode.”

The Netherlands was one of the earlier countries in Europe to show mass infections, and on March 16 started what Rutte called an intelligent lockdown: schools, bars, restaurants, gyms and contact professions were shut and people asked to keep a distance and work from home. Later, the government imposed a limit of three adults meeting and €390 personal fines, but actually gave out very few personal or business fines.

Rutte has always appealed to people’s common sense rather than taking a top-down approach. “From the beginning, we have tried to talk adult to adult to tell Dutch society of the facts and what the world’s best virologists are advising,” he said this week.

However, faced with an economic contraction of 6 per cent, the Dutch experts now recommend broad-scale reopening, with limits especially inside and 1.5m distancing (or facemasks). Loes Hartman, a spokeswoman for the RIVM, said they had now also weighed up the 'social costs' of lockdown: “This means the extent to which children will be behind if schools are closed, economic damage, psychological impacts and a broad spectrum of effects that are often negative.”

Not everything has gone right. There has been some criticism that many corona deaths went uncounted due to limited testing before June, and officially the country of 17 million has the 15th highest number of deaths internationally. Economist Mathijs Bouman told The Telegraph: “Economically, we have managed it quite well but of course we have a rather high death rate, especially in nursing homes, and a lot of that was probably preventable. Our laid-back approach, especially in testing, was clearly not the right one so we lost the game in the first couple of weeks.

“We are going to the boundaries of what’s possible at the moment – but since one third of our money is earned abroad we are still a cork floating on a wild international sea.”

The sex trade could be at the coalface of whether the bold Dutch approach will provoke a second wave of infection – for those that did, indeed, stop.

Sex work activist and webcam and pornography performer Yvette Luhrs told NOS Radio 1 that the reopening was a relief, tinged with bitterness. “It took too long for a colleague who ended it all earlier this week,” she said, “but also for people who have been evicted from their homes, and for the sex workers who just had to carry on working and were at risk.”