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The Dutch parliament is debating an emergency law that would give the government the power to make masks mandatory in public places if it chose to, as the daily rate of new infections reached a new record high of nearly 5,000, Reuters reported.
Until recently, the Netherlands was so comfortable with its test-and-trace plan for a second wave of coronavirus infections that it thought there was no need to make people wear face masks.
But in the past month, a surge in new cases has catapulted the per capita infection rate into the top 10 in the world, with a weekly infection rate of around 160 per 100,000 population, as that plan has run into trouble.
