1761 corona patients are currently being treated in the intensive care units of German hospitals – a week ago it was almost 300 fewer.
The clinics are concerned with this increase in the number of patients by around 15 percent within a week. If this development continues, “in two weeks we will have 3000 patients in intensive care units again,” says Gerald Gaß, Managing Director of the German Hospital Association (DKG), to the “RND”.
For comparison: Last autumn, 1462 corona patients were treated in intensive care at the same time. The sad climax of the crisis was January 3rd with 5745 intensive care patients.
► So it means: The health system’s load limit is still far from being reached. Nevertheless, Gaß speaks of “a critical pandemic situation”.
The hospitals could also treat 3,000 Covid patients, but would then have to gradually restrict regular operations in the clinics and postpone less important operations in order to create personnel capacities.
“Even if the hospitals can do this, it will not be able to run without restriction of regular operations,” said the head of the association. Then the doctors in the clinics would have to postpone plannable, less urgent treatments again.
But the numbers not only increased among seriously ill intensive care patients, according to Gaß there was also an increase of 40 percent to 4,300 patients in the normal ward.
The so-called 7-day hospitalization rate, i.e. the number of people out of 100,000 citizens who have to go to hospital within a week because of a corona illness is 3.07 – in the third corona wave this value was 15. 7- However, due to the regional differences, the daily hospitalization rate has no political consequences – that is, there are no limit values that are tied to measures.