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Patient in a corona intensive care unit in Stuttgart, January 4, 2021
Photo: Sebastian Lock / laif
The coronavirus is demanding a lot from people, for a good year now.
The current outlook: rather cautious.
"Germany faces eight to ten very tough weeks," said Chancellor Angela Merkel in mid-January.
So we're right in the middle of it.
Somewhere around Easter it should be less tough.
At least one hopes, because of the mutants the situation is difficult to assess.
The daily Corona issues, in the past and probably also in the coming days: Vaccines, mutations, rapid tests, Corona deniers, NoCovid and again and again the shutdown with its diverse negative consequences for families, for students, for the economy, for yourself general well-being, in fact for everything and everyone.
After all, a visit to the hairdresser will soon be tempting again.
What is in the background: The actual disease Covid-19 with its immediate consequences.
The many people who contract Covid-19, the many people who have suffered severe long-term consequences or have died from it.
Covid-19 can also attack the heart, brain, kidneys and gastrointestinal tract
Who needs a refresher: Covid-19 is the disease that can break out as a result of a coronavirus infection.
Not everyone who contracts the virus gets sick.
An estimated 30 percent of infections are symptomatic.
Those affected do not even notice that their body is currently fighting the corona virus.
In a good half of those infected, the course is mild to moderate.
There is a wide range behind this: it can be a few days with coughing, but also several weeks with coughing, breathing difficulties, fever, loss of smell and taste.
Loss of the sense of smell is a fairly common symptom of corona infections.
The exact nature of the symptoms of those affected, who fall into the mild to moderate category in Germany, is nowhere precisely recorded, so we do not know how many people lie flat for several weeks or cough a little for just two days.
About 15 percent of those affected become so seriously ill that they have to be hospitalized.
This proportion depends on the average age of the sick, because the risk of a severe course increases with age.
Regardless of the severity of the acute illness, those affected can still be in poor health weeks or months after the infection.
This phenomenon is called Long-Covid.
About three quarters of those recovered in Wuhan were still struggling with fatigue, muscle weakness, sleep disorders, depression or anxiety disorders after six months.
In other studies, even months after a corona infection, people describe that they suffer from shortness of breath or difficulty concentrating.
In the case of Corona, unfortunately, recovery does not always mean healthy.
Acute Covid-19 disease, as we know after a year of pandemic, can not only seriously damage the lungs, but also affect the brain, nervous system, heart, gastrointestinal tract and kidneys.
The disease can drive clotting out of control, causing thrombosis, pulmonary embolism, or numerous small clots.
Not only is the virus a problem, your own immune system can become one.
In a so-called cytokine storm, it can release dramatically increased quantities of messenger substances, which then damage organs instead of promoting healing.
With Covid, a "severe course" means in many cases: The breathing or the lungs of those affected are so severely impaired that their bodies can no longer get enough oxygen.
So that people do not suffocate, invasive ventilation is often the last resort, which makes a drug-induced coma necessary.
In particularly severe cases, it is even necessary for an external device to take over the work of the lungs, i.e. breathing.
In this so-called Ecmo, the blood is passed from the body through a cannula into a device that removes carbon dioxide from the blood and enriches it with oxygen.
Those affected usually have to spend many days in the intensive care unit with artificial ventilation or Ecmo.
The exertion of this treatment leaves its mark: people lose muscles, unlearn how to breathe, develop difficulty swallowing, and are long-term exhausted.
They need rehab to regain as much of their health as possible.
But almost 30 percent of the seriously ill on intensive care die, despite the exhausting efforts of nurses and doctors.
In the "taz" a rehab doctor said: "As macabre as it is, if not so many died, we in the rehab clinics would be completely overwhelmed by now." And: Yes, such thoughts must "really first be metabolized".
Indeed.
Some of the intensive care beds are being vacated because people have died
Anyone who regularly looks at another key figure of the pandemic, the "free intensive care beds", should also make it clear that a relevant part of these beds has become free again because a person has died.
Those who demand “more intensive care beds” in order to be able to lift the restrictions are not only failing to recognize that beds alone are of no use because people are also needed who can care for and treat the sick.
Rather, he or she simply accepts further deaths in this calculation.
The dead are often only a number in the reporting, reported daily as soon as the Robert Koch Institute publishes the current statistics on new corona infections and deaths.
580 deaths, 534, 560, 528, 116, 218, 551, 556, 666, 813 etc. day after day.
You can see curves and diagrams with these numbers.
These are not stock market charts, no climate diagrams.
Every one is a dead person.
Each one means grieving relatives and friends.
In October, DER SPIEGEL published 50 obituaries for people who died from Covid-19.
Just a glimpse of some of the many fates.
And yes, most people "in connection with Corona" die, die
to
Covid-19 and not
with
Covid-19th
Even if many of them were old and already had previous illnesses, they still had years of life ahead of them that the illness had robbed them of.
Incidentally, previous illnesses include high blood pressure, around 19 million people with statutory health insurance in Germany have this diagnosis.
On December 2nd, Bernd Böttiger, director of the anesthesiology clinic at Cologne University Hospital, told SPIEGEL: "Hundreds of people are now dying in this country every day, on Tuesday it was 487. It's like a jumbo jet crashing here every day."
Between December 2 and February 17, an average of 635 deaths related to Covid-19 were reported daily in Germany.
Far more than a jumbo jet every day.
Perhaps this picture helps to clarify the terrible impact of this disease - and that even in spite of all the measures that have ensured that far fewer people in Germany are infected with the corona virus than would have been infected without a shutdown or mask requirement.
And reminds that the basic problem is not the measures, but the virus and the disease that it can cause.
Icon: The mirror
