Will it be tight again soon in the intensive care units?
Doctors fear a doubling of the corona patients who need intensive treatment. Christian Karagiannidis, scientific director of the intensive care register of the German Interdisciplinary Association for Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine (Divi), said that the same number of corona patients would have to be cared for in the intensive care units with almost 2,500 cases as at the same point in time a year ago “Augsburger Allgemeine” (Monday).
In the coming weeks, the number is expected to almost double if the new infections continue to rise as before. “With an incidence of 300, we expect around 4500 Covid patients nationwide with large regional differences,” warned Karagiannidis. The number of new infections has risen rapidly in the past few days, on Monday morning the nationwide seven-day incidence per 100,000 inhabitants was already over 200.
Bavaria’s Minister of Health, Klaus Holetschek, warned in the newspaper: “A further doubling would be numerically well above the highs of the past waves and our health system in Germany would no longer be able to cope with it.” The CSU politician sees one of the main causes in the low vaccination rate. “In Bavaria, too, the unvaccinated in particular flood our hospitals. More than 90 percent of these are patients who have turned down the chance of a vaccination to date, ”said Holetschek.
Intensive care physician Karagiannidis believes it is difficult to make long-term predictions about the course of the pandemic. Based on the incidences, one can predict relatively clearly what will happen in the next few weeks. “What we can’t predict is at what level it will stall,” he said. It is unclear what effect 2G rules and booster vaccinations have or whether the population is changing their behavior. “We are currently navigating through the fog without GPS,” said Karagiannidis.