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The situation is already threatening.
The number of Covid intensive care patients is rising steadily, and in view of the record levels of new infections, there is a risk of overburdening hospitals across Germany.
The focus is increasingly on those who care for the patients there.
One of them is Ute Spiegel.
She works as a nurse in the intensive care unit of the DRK clinics in Berlin.
“The number of unvaccinated patients now predominates and the patients are getting much younger. So the average age in the last 14 days was actually 40, 50. You actually leave the intensive care unit in very, very need of care. You have to learn everything again, you have to learn to breathe again yourself, you have to learn to walk again yourself. There are so many processes, so many difficult processes that also have to do with the blood circulation, that you are really a different person when you wake up and will certainly see a lot differently. "
While the coronavirus situation in Germany was relatively relaxed for a long time in late summer, the numbers are now skyrocketing like never before in this country.
In terms of the proportion of new infections every day, Germany now ranks second behind the USA in an international comparison.
"Now, increasingly, with the younger patients who have had a difficult course, it is really very, very difficult to bear mentally." I am a mother of two sons. The youngest is 26, the other is 30. At that age the patients, some of whom I now look after here, are frightening. And those were actually healthy patients - not vaccinated. "
On average, 90 percent of intensive care beds across Germany are already occupied.
Experts are demanding quick and decisive action from politics - but it is in the middle of a change of government.
“That feels very scary because I think they're all going to have a rude awakening. We must not assume that those who have been vaccinated will no longer spread the disease. And if we allow all of the Christmas markets etc. again without regulations, then automatically many, many more patients will fall ill again. "
The corona pandemic also highlights the shortcomings in care that have been ignored for far too long.
“And I don't want to be pityed because I'm a nurse, and unfortunately this situation has come to that at the moment and I don't think that's justified at all. Sure, we work a lot and we have a lot of stress. But I can still just say that this is the job I want to do. We just need help, we need help, we need politics. We need new colleagues, we need people who support it and who choose this profession. And I'm not ready to give up, and neither am I ready to allow so much pity. I would rather have the admiration for the nursing profession back. And not just by clapping, but by real appreciation on the part of politics, employers, society. "
