Fourth wave
Bavaria’s clinics at the limit: “We barely have any capacity”
A doctor examines a corona patient in the intensive care unit at the Asklepios Clinic in Munich
© Peter Kneffel / DPA
The corona situation in Bavaria is worsening dramatically. There are drastic warnings from the hospitals about the overloading of the intensive care units. “We are like a hamster wheel that keeps accelerating,” warns a clinic official.
In view of the unchecked increase in the number of corona infections, the Bavarian hospitals are warning of an imminent overload of the intensive care units and are calling for significantly tougher contact restrictions in the Free State. “The current situation is more dramatic than it has ever been in Bavaria during the entire pandemic,” said the managing director of the Bavarian Hospital Society, Roland Engehausen, of the “Augsburger Allgemeine”.
“We already have hardly any capacity,” reported Engehausen. In Bavarian clinics, even cancer operations would have to be postponed indefinitely. The transfer of patients to neighboring federal states is also becoming more and more difficult. According to the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), the seven-day incidence in the Free State rose from Friday to a new high of 625.3.
“The infection numbers have to go down in order to be able to carry out the predictable treatments that we are now postponing,” said the hospital representative. “We need significant avoidance of contact,” demanded Engehausen. “Whether you call it lockdown or something else is of secondary importance to us hospitals.”
The currently planned steps were not sufficient to curb the increase in the number of infections: “At the moment we do not see any sufficiently effective countermeasures that would bring relief to us in the clinics in the next two to four weeks,” warned the representative of the Bavarian clinics . “That makes the situation so dramatic both now and in the perspective of the next few weeks.”
The number of corona intensive care patients in Bavaria is increasing by around 30 percent every week without tough countermeasures, “so that we will soon no longer have a chance for transfers within the Free State,” said Engehausen.
Bavarian intensive care patients are already being transferred to other federal states. “But the way to Baden-Württemberg is actually already closed because the clinics there are getting closer to the Bavarian situation,” said the hospital representative. “We don’t know whether we’ll be able to bring anyone to Hessen in a few weeks. You don’t need to drive to Thuringia and Saxony, and in the south of Austria the situation is no better than here.”
Despite appropriate preparations by some hospitals, Bavaria is still a long way from triage. “We still do not see such a situation in Bavarian clinics,” emphasized Engehausen. “We have the ability to postpone planned treatments, move patients over longer distances to regions that are less stressed, and other means,” he said.
However, the current development has even exceeded the very pessimistic expectations of the clinics. “October 22nd was the tipping point, since then we have had sharply rising incidence figures and the associated increase in intensive care treatments. We have gotten into a hamster wheel that continues to accelerate.”
Two patients moved from Bavaria to South Tyrol
One possible way out for clinics in Upper Bavaria is to relocate patients to South Tyrol in Italy. The province still has treatment places available for corona intensive care patients – also from Germany and Austria. “In the current phase we still have resources,” said Marc Kaufmann, the Covid operations manager in the Alpine province. In the previous week, a patient was flown to Bozen by helicopter, and a second corona sufferer came to the intensive care unit in Merano in an ambulance. According to Kaufmann, the two Bavarians are so far the only corona patients who have been taken on from abroad.
Nine people tell why they didn’t get vaccinated
11 images
In the Alpine region, people are now concerned that the numbers will rise at a similar rate as they did recently in Germany and Austria. Kaufmann sees parallels to spring 2020, when the situation initially escalated in the northern Italian areas around Bergamo and Milan before the virus worked its way north. “Just as we looked at Lombardy in the first wave, we are now looking at Austria with Salzburg, Carinthia and North Tyrol as well as Bavaria.”
Kaufmann fears a similar increase in South Tyrol with a time lag, especially since he found similar ways of life and “a similar vaccination fatigue” in his province as in Austria and Bavaria. “It would be presumptuous to believe that Brenner can stop the pandemic.”