The German Hospital Society sees the country’s clinics facing a difficult time due to a significant increase in patients with corona infection. “We have significant increases in the number of covid-positive patients. Compared to the previous week, occupancy has increased by 50 percent,” said CEO Gerald Gass to the editorial network Germany (RND/Wednesday). “With around 19,000 patients who tested positive, we are currently as high as at the peak of the summer wave.” Gass warned: “We are heading towards extremely difficult weeks across the board and not just in southern Germany.”
According to him, additional problems are causing the clinics the high staff shortages. The increase in corona-positive patients also means increased protection against infection and thus more work. Gass complained of a “devastating triad” of staff shortages due to Corona and other respiratory diseases, economic pressure from inflation and bureaucracy. “All of this will result in hospitals postponing services and having to temporarily deregister departments.”
A tweet by ZDF journalist Stefan Leifert, who looked around in a clinic in Munich, shows how devastating the situation is in some cities.
The number of corona-infected patients in intensive care units has also recently increased significantly – on Tuesday it was 1660, according to the intensive care register of the German Interdisciplinary Association for Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine. The head of the register, Christian Karagiannidis, told the RND that “probably about 50 percent” of the patients would also have to be treated for Covid-19 – the rest would not have come to the intensive care unit because of the infection. “Nevertheless, all patients must be isolated and the corona infection can worsen the prognosis of patients with other diseases.”
Karagiannidis also warned of staff shortages with a view to the intensive care units: “In some regions of Bavaria, Hesse and in several cities in North Rhine-Westphalia, we already have hotspots where there are hardly any free intensive care beds left because the staff are often symptomatic and absent for a longer period of time,” said he. “We have to prepare for this in many other parts of Germany in the coming weeks.”
The Robert Koch Institute (RKI) gave the nationwide seven-day incidence on Wednesday morning as 799.9. The day before, the value of new corona infections per 100,000 inhabitants and week was 787.5 (previous week: 414.0; previous month: 216.0). However, this information only provides a very incomplete picture of the number of infections.
Experts have been assuming for some time that there will be a large number of cases not recorded by the RKI – mainly because not all infected people have a PCR test done. Only positive PCR tests count in the statistics. In addition, late registrations or transmission problems can lead to a distortion of individual daily values.