pandemic
Doctors fear doubling of corona intensive care patients
An ambulance in front of the emergency room: the 7-day incidence of new infections with the corona virus has reached over 200, the highest value since the beginning of the corona pandemic. Photo: Julian Stratenschulte / dpa
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The numbers keep rising. More and more newly infected people have to go to hospital. Doctors sound the alarm.
Doctors fear a doubling of the corona patients in intensive care units.
Christian Karagiannidis, scientific director of the intensive care register of the German Interdisciplinary Association for Intensive Care and Intensive Care, said already now, with almost 2500 cases, as many corona patients would have to be cared for in the intensive care units as at the same point in time a year ago with the second corona wave Emergency medicine (Divi), the “Augsburger Allgemeine” (Monday). In the coming weeks, the number is expected to almost double if the new infections continue to rise as before.
“With an incidence of 300, we expect around 4500 Covid patients nationwide with large regional differences,” warned Karagiannidis. The number of new infections has risen steeply in the past few days, on Sunday the nationwide seven-day incidence per 100,000 inhabitants was just under 200.
Bavaria’s Minister of Health, Klaus Holetschek, warned in the newspaper: “A further doubling would be numerically well above the highs of the past waves and our health system in Germany would no longer be able to cope with it.” The CSU politician sees one of the main causes in the low vaccination rate. “In Bavaria, too, the unvaccinated in particular flood our hospitals. More than 90 percent of these are patients who have turned down the chance of a vaccination to date, ”said Holetschek.
Intensive care physician Karagiannidis believes it is difficult to make long-term predictions about the course of the pandemic. Based on the incidences, one can predict relatively clearly what will happen in the next few weeks. “What we can’t predict is at what level the whole thing will come to a standstill,” he said. It is unclear what effect 2G rules and booster vaccinations have or whether the population is changing their behavior. “We are currently navigating through the fog without GPS,” said Karagiannidis.