The virus has reached the hospitals. The gigantic omicron wave is currently washing more and more patients into the clinics. And you hear it again, the skeptical question: are these people even lying there? because Covid-19 or just With? Do many not just happen to have the infection that doesn’t bother them at all?
It used to be mostly murmurs. But actually the question is highly relevant now. And it’s all the more annoying that you can’t answer them properly because of the pathological under-collection of data in this country. Because the number of people who only With and not because Covid-19 in the hospital should be bigger than ever. Finally, omicron causes slightly milder infections than previous variants of the virus, and many people are well protected with vaccines and boosters. That is why the mere infection numbers are no longer as threatening as in previous waves.
But what is still threatening is a difficult situation in the hospitals. If there are still many – and for the clinics simply too many – patients who require treatment, then all the more must be done to counteract the wave. But in order to be able to take countermeasures at an early stage, you need the data.
Patients who are in the clinic with or because of Corona can be differentiated
It’s true: Infected patients are always a problem for a hospital, even if they don’t have any Covid symptoms. Because of the necessary isolation, the treatment is much more complex than in patients without a virus. Sometimes one develops With also only in the clinic to one because, because the infection is increasing in drama. And it is also true: in intensive care units With and because obsolete. A seriously ill person who is infected with Sars-CoV-2 always has an unfavorable prognosis – even if he has come to the clinic because of a heart attack or car accident.
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And yet the distinction is important and doable. This is once again demonstrated by the data leader England: The statistics there show that the proportion of patients who because Covid-19 are treated, among all infected patients in the omicron wave is only 60 percent, in summer it was 80 percent. But you can also see: The absolute number of Because-patients increases due to Omikron anyway, in the first week of January alone it almost doubled from 4300 to 8200. The German statistics should also show such figures transparently. Not only would they be a more effective warning system. You could show something else unequivocally: that at Omikron, too, it is above all the unvaccinated and least of all the boosted ones who become seriously ill. Covid-19 is a terrible disease. But chronic data underreporting in the country is a real plague.