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Intensive care unit in Spain: The care of corona patients is often very labor-intensive
Photo: Emilio Morenatti / dpa
Clinical staff is becoming scarce in several European countries due to the rapidly increasing Omikron infection rates.
Countries such as Great Britain, Spain, the Netherlands and Italy are particularly affected at the moment.
There are some indications that the rapidly spreading variant of the coronavirus causes less severe symptoms of the disease.
Nevertheless, due to the extremely high number of infections, many people have to be treated.
At the same time, doctors and nurses are en masse in quarantine or infected.
Now politicians and stakeholders are looking for new ways to prevent the system from becoming overloaded.
In Great Britain, under pressure from the government, in the next three months private hospitals and medical practices are to carry out cancer operations that were actually supposed to be done in state NHS clinics.
"With Omikron we have to treat more patients but have fewer staff available," said Stephen Powis, medical director for the NHS.
Omikron is currently spreading at breakneck speed in Great Britain, and the government around Prime Minister Boris Johnson has so far waived any new restrictions on public life.
At some point, the health system will be able to live with Covid-19 and withstand the pressure, said British Minister Michael Gove.
“But we are absolutely not ready yet.
There are still a few difficult weeks ahead of us. "
In Spain, the personnel situation in hospitals is so tight that nursing staff are being pulled back from retirement.
The authorities also said that the contact tracking in the health authorities could no longer be sufficiently carried out.
According to a newspaper report, Spain wants to follow up infections less strictly in the future, test less and proceed as with classic flu infections.
Since the death rates for corona diseases have fallen, it could be time to deal with the pandemic in other ways, said the Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez the broadcaster SER.
In the Netherlands, hospitals are considering letting people with symptom-free corona infection continue to work.
At the Amsterdam University Clinic, every fourth employee had recently tested positive, it said there.
A week ago, the positive rate was five percent.
In Italy, the situation is tense anyway, with around four percent of hospital workers being suspended from work because they are not vaccinated.
The health authorities there are therefore urging that unnecessary operations be postponed.
Nursing staff and doctors sometimes have to postpone their vacations.
In Germany, too, there is growing concern about the health system being overloaded.
The current measures are not enough to contain the Omikron wave, warned the Green politician Janosch Dahmen on Monday.
The health policy spokesman for the parliamentary group again brought the closure of fitness studios or restaurants into discussion.
che / Reuters
