In the Lower Bavarian district of Rottal-Inn, the incidence has once again climbed over the thousand mark. Unlike before Christmas, the situation in the intensive care units of the Rottal-Inn clinics in Eggenfelden and Pfarrkirchen is “relatively relaxed,” says the spokesman for the district office, Mathias Kempf. “We have eight corona cases in the clinics, none of them currently in the intensive care unit.” Things looked very different in November, when the situation was so dramatic that more than 20 patients had to be transferred to clinics throughout Bavaria in a major operation.
However, the danger of the clinics collapsing has not been averted, only the focus is shifting away from the intensive care units. According to the current state of knowledge, the now dominant omicron variant probably causes milder courses, which is why the intensive care units no longer fill up so quickly. But the normal stations. “A flood of inpatient Omikron patients, often only as an incidental or incidental finding, would also have a massive impact on the hospitals,” says Mathias Kempf.
Christian Schmitz, CEO of the Arberland clinics, which operate two houses in the Regen district, also sees the functionality of the hospitals at risk: “There will be significantly more incidental findings in our patients who did not come to the clinic because of Covid. But this increases the personnel and time expenditure significantly.”
staff failures
The situation is similar in other regions. The RoMed clinics in the city and district of Rosenheim, for example, where the seven-day incidence is now well above the former hotspot value of 1000, currently only have to care for six corona patients in the intensive care unit. However, the number of corona patients in the normal wards has doubled within a week. The RoMed clinics expect the numbers to continue to rise here – and at the same time with increasing absences from nursing staff. Most recently, around 100 nursing staff were missing due to their own corona infections, which is why the RoMed clinics had to adjust their admission capacities downwards.
The Inn clinics in the two Upper Bavarian districts of Altötting and Mühldorf have recently reported a significant relaxation. The situation in the intensive care units there has been dramatic in the past three months, but at the end of last week there were only a handful of corona patients in intensive care in the inn clinics.
Manfred Wagner would currently neither tighten nor relax the corona measures. The pandemic officer at the Fürth Clinic advises “instead to drive on sight”. It is crucial to be able to react quickly to situations: “In the current situation, nobody knows what will happen because the pandemic is not behaving as expected.” At the moment, however, the situation in the Fürth Clinic is comparatively relaxed. Two Covid patients are in the intensive care unit, ten in the normal ward. At the beginning of December last year, however, the intensive care unit was permanently overcrowded, reports press spokeswoman Carmen Brückner: At that time, the maximum values were up to twelve patients in the intensive care unit and 47 in the normal ward.
Many patients are waiting for interventions
At the moment, the infection process is very common in children and adolescents, explains Stefan John, head of the interdisciplinary intensive care department at the Nuremberg Clinic. Those who fell ill were usually less severe. But if more people become infected overall, there may also be more older people. In Nuremberg, too, significantly fewer patients are currently being treated than at the beginning of December. “But that doesn’t mean that there can be talk of relaxation,” says John, “since a large number of patients are waiting for urgent, postponed interventions even without Covid-19.”
The descriptions from the clinics match the information from the Bavarian State Office for Health and Food Safety regarding bed occupancy through confirmed Covid 19 cases: The state office registers 340 occupied intensive care beds, which corresponds to a decrease of 15.0 percent compared to the previous week (as of: January 24). During the same period, the number of Covid patients occupying a regular hospital bed rose to 1,927, up 16.4 percent.
Mathias Kempf from the district office of Rottal-Inn considers it urgently necessary to react to the threat posed by the omicron variant: “Currently, this is still limited. However, this problem becomes more likely as the population becomes infected.” It therefore makes more sense to take the inpatient occupancy of Covid patients as a benchmark in the future and no longer just the number of free intensive care beds.