Coronavirus pandemic: Austria’s hospitals are at their limit

Austria’s hospitals are reaching their limit in the fight against the corona pandemic. In many places, so many intensive care beds are occupied that planned operations have to be canceled. But there is also good news.

The case of 4-year-old Johanna is currently causing a stir throughout Austria. The girl’s heart operation planned for next week at the children’s cardiology department at the Kepler University Hospital in Linz was postponed to February next year. There are no more free intensive care beds.

The child’s mother described a call from the hospital to the ORF with the words: “She then said yes in mid-February. And as she said in mid-February, it really tore the floor from under my feet.”

The girl had been born with a serious heart defect, had already had two operations – and the third operation would have taken place next week. The head of pediatric cardiology at the Linz University Clinic, Gerald Tulzer, says: “We would need an intensive care unit for this operation, which is currently not available to us because very acute patients populate the intensive care unit.”

Half of the planned operations are postponed

The University Hospital Linz must, so its medical director Karl-Heinz Stadlbauer explained at the request of the ARD studios Vienna, currently postpone around 50 percent of the planned operations. It cannot be ruled out that operations for cancer patients may also be affected.

According to the written communication, this is “a certain type of triage, whereby acute, vital operations can of course still be carried out.”

There were two reasons for the postponements of the operating theater: The intensive care units being used by Covid patients – and the withdrawal of the staff to care for these patients from other wards.

Shortly before “very high systemic risk”

According to the Austrian health authority AGES, 31 percent of intensive care beds across the country are occupied by Covid-19 patients. The value is just below the critical threshold of 33 percent – according to the authorities, there is then “a very high systemic risk”. In the federal states of Carinthia and Upper Austria, however, these occupancy figures, with 50 and 40 percent respectively, Covid patients in the intensive care units are well above this warning level.

Christoph Wenisch, the head of the infection department at Klinik Wien Favoriten, whose intensive care units are two-thirds occupied by Covid patients, said yesterday evening in a special broadcast on ORF that up to now all bottlenecks caused by the transfer of patients to other federal states have been overcome: ” In the whole 24 months we were never in the situation where we had to do that. Of course we positioned ourselves so that it wouldn’t happen. ”

Lockdown is starting to take effect

The nationwide lockdown, in force since November 22, is starting to take effect, according to the state health authority. The seven-day incidence, which had peaked at 1100 on November 22nd, decreased to currently 854. According to the assessment of the Covid forecast consortium, this trend will continue and affect the overburdened hospitals with a time delay.

However: The situation in Carinthia remains very critical, there the number of intensive care beds will no longer be sufficient next week. In the other federal states, a “noticeable relief” for the hospitals can be expected.