Status: 05.07.2022 07:03
The number of infections has been increasing for weeks – according to the RKI, the incidence is now 687.7. This is also noticeable in the hospitals: individual wards have already been canceled due to a lack of staff.
The increasing loss of clinic staff due to the corona summer wave is causing concern among hospitals and doctors. “We have received reports from all federal states that individual wards and departments also have to be deregistered due to a lack of staff,” said the CEO of the German Hospital Society (DKG), Gerald Gass, the “Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland”. At times, emergency admissions would also be canceled at the rescue control centers. “This situation worries us considerably in view of the upcoming autumn.”
The intensive care occupancy is only increasing moderately, but the occupancy for a summer is relatively high, and the available beds are becoming fewer and fewer due to the lack of staff, said the scientific director of the intensive care bed register, Christian Karagiannidis, of the “Rheinische Post”. Therefore, the time should now be used to optimally distribute capacities. This included regional networks for the best possible patient distribution. “Cooperation, but also relieving the burden on staff, will be the order of the day this fall and winter,” said Karagiannidis, who also sits on the Federal Government’s Expert Council.
Patient protection against shortened quarantine
The German Foundation for Patient Protection rejected a demand for the quarantine period to be shortened. FDP Vice Wolfgang Kubicki had suggested free testing by quick test after just three days. So far there are five, a free test is only recommended, it is only mandatory for hospital and nursing staff. A shortened quarantine period would fuel the uncontrolled spread of corona, criticized foundation board member Eugen Brysch in the newspapers of the Funke media group. “Therefore, the isolation time for corona positives must be extended to ten days. This may only be shortened if a PCR test is negative.”
The head of the GEW education union, Maike Finnern, called for a legal basis for mask and test requirements in order to avoid school closures in autumn. This includes the possibility of a mask requirement if the number of infections continues to rise sharply. Then regular tests in the educational institutions would have to be possible again, she told the RND. Everything must be done to prevent schools and daycare centers from closing again.
The chairman of the Education and Training Association (VBE), Udo Beckmann, expects individual learning groups or schools to be closed again if the infection rate is high, as he told the RND. Against this background, too, schools would have to be digitally equipped in such a way that students could be reached digitally during distance learning: “Even after two years of the pandemic, there are still schools that do not have a broadband connection or WLAN.”
Nationwide incidence continues to rise
The number of infections has risen sharply in recent weeks. The Robert Koch Institute (RKI) gave the nationwide seven-day incidence in the morning at 687.7. This emerges from numbers that reflect the status of the RKI dashboard at 5:16 a.m. The day before, the value of new infections per 100,000 inhabitants and week was 650.7 (previous week: 635.8; previous month: 257.6).
However, the incidence does not provide a complete picture of the infection situation. Experts have been assuming for some time that there has been a very high number of cases not recorded by the RKI – mainly because by far not all infected people have a PCR test done. Only positive PCR tests count in the statistics. In addition, late registrations or transmission problems can lead to a distortion of individual daily values.
The health authorities in Germany recently reported 147,489 new corona infections (previous week: 142,329) and 102 deaths (previous week: 113) to the RKI within one day. Here, too, comparisons of the data are only possible to a limited extent due to the test behavior, late registrations and transmission problems. In general, the number of registered new infections and deaths varies significantly from weekday to weekday, since many federal states do not transmit them to the RKI, especially at weekends, and report their cases later in the week.
The RKI has counted 28,542,484 detected infections with Sars-CoV-2 since the beginning of the pandemic. The actual total number is likely to be significantly higher, as many infections go undetected.
Agreement in the citizen test dispute
In the dispute over the billing of the so-called citizen tests, Federal Health Minister Karl Lauterbach and the National Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians (KBV) reached an agreement yesterday evening. Both announced this after discussions. Nothing will change in the new rules for citizen tests. Since last Thursday, the citizen tests have only been free for certain risk groups and occasions. In many other cases, an additional payment of three euros is due. The Corona Test Ordinance stipulates who is entitled to what.
The National Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians, which is responsible for billing the tests, had criticized the rules as too bureaucratic and announced that it would no longer be able to bill the citizen tests in the future. KBV boss Andreas Gassen also called for the tests to be stopped completely and described them as “nonsensical”.
It has now been clarified that the associations of statutory health insurance physicians do not have to check the new eligibility requirements for citizen tests, the KBV said. The decisive factor is that they are “neither responsible for cases of fraud that are based on false or falsified information from those tested or test centers, nor are they held responsible for them afterwards”.
Lauterbach announced that the Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians continued to check the billing. “Anomalies in the test results are evaluated later. Fraud with citizen tests should no longer be worthwhile.”