Use of the Air Force: Corona patients relocated by plane

The relief operation of the Air Force to relocate corona intensive care patients within Germany has started. Six seriously ill people were flown from Bavaria to North Rhine-Westphalia. More flights will follow.

The Bundeswehr has started special flights to transfer corona intensive care patients within Germany. In the afternoon, six patients seriously ill with Covid-19 were brought on board an Air Force ambulance aircraft from Memmingen in Bavaria to Münster / Osnabrück Airport to be distributed to various clinics in North Rhine-Westphalia for further treatment.

For the first time, the Bundeswehr is helping to relieve hospitals in regions with a particularly large number of corona intensive care patients. The Air Force is providing two aircraft for this. It is an Airbus A310 MedEvac with six treatment places as well as a converted special machine, the surveillance aircraft A319OH. Two places for intensive treatment were built into this.

North Rhine-Westphalia creates the conditions for help

In North Rhine-Westphalia, the current infection situation and the situation in the intensive care units is currently much less dramatic than in Bavaria, for example. Both the seven-day incidence of new infections and the seven-day incidence of hospitalizations in the most populous federal state are currently well below the national average. “The situation with us is such that we can help, and we do that,” said North Rhine-Westphalia’s Prime Minister Hendrik Wüst in the state parliament.

A change in the law, which the state government and the state parliament decided in a hurry, was necessary to take over the patients. The state’s hospitals are instructed to postpone operations that can be planned according to medical considerations in order to create space for seriously ill corona patients from outside as well.

The basis for the deployment of the Air Force, which has now started, is the so-called cloverleaf system for a nationwide distribution of patients from individual regions in which there is a risk of overburdening hospitals. According to a catalog of criteria of the intensive care medicine association Divi, a transfer of patients with other illnesses is only planned in exceptional cases. The concept was launched in spring 2020 under the impression of the first corona wave.

More flights in the next few days

A total of 50 patients from Bavaria are to be transferred to other federal states, around 30 of them by Sunday. Patients are brought from Thuringia to Lower Saxony. Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania will be accepting four intensive care patients from overloaded clinics in Saxony in the coming days. How many Bundeswehr flights there will be is still unclear, according to the Defense Ministry.

World Medical Association boss Frank Ulrich Montgomery advocated transferring patients not only within Germany, but also to clinics in other EU countries. This “systematic transfer of Covid patients abroad” must be initiated immediately in order to relieve German hospitals.