Irma Sluis responds to ‘the cough’

You won't have missed it, the press conference from last night. Maybe you didn't catch it live, but of course, you read about the measures online. And you naturally notice when you suddenly can't enter a store because you're not wearing a face mask. But if you did see it, you know: those measures weren't the most striking thing of the evening. No, that was Irma Sluis. And not because she is the celebrity of 2020, no…

Irma was actually coughing. During corona time. IN HER HAND. While Rutte repeatedly emphasized that we should cough and sneeze into our elbow, Irma set the completely wrong example. Panic. Uproar. Twitter went wild. This could not happen. And poor Irma faced half of the Netherlands because she wasn't coughing in a corona-proof way.

‘I had a tickle in my throat and it made me quite nervous,’ she said. Well, I can understand that. You're standing there in front of a million viewers and you don't want to fall behind on your sentences, of course. ‘It was also the speed at which it was going. Although I didn't do it on purpose, otherwise you end up four sentences behind Mark Rutte in terms of speed.’ Exactly that.

And well, a little tickle cough is not contagious and that's what it was. ‘I'm not sick,’ she assures and she also mentions that she recently took a test that came back negative. Now I also have a tickle cough when I'm nervous, which has already caused quite a few sideways glances during corona times. And that — thank God — didn't go viral on Twitter and wasn't seen nationally on TV either.

But hey, there are worse things in the world. ‘Tomorrow everyone will have forgotten about it,’ Irma Sluis concludes. And that's how it is.