Bavaria’s intensive care units are getting tight, so around 50 patients are to be relocated to other federal states. Can that work in a hurry? How the shamrock concept is supposed to save lives.
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Maximilian Gerl, Matthias Köpf and Clara Lipkowski, Nuremberg / Munich
Has he ever experienced such a situation? Marc Gistrichovsky, head of the integrated control center in Nuremberg, was hit by the Elbe flood in 2002. “We ordered sandbags for all of Germany,” he says on the phone. But this is something new. Because the intensive care units in Bavaria are getting tight, around 50 patients are now to be transferred to other federal states as quickly as possible – co-organized by Gistrichovsky and his colleagues. And not just in the middle of a pandemic with limited capacities everywhere, but also according to a completely new concept called the clover leaf. “Nobody has ever done that before,” says Gistrichovsky.