Alsace is considered the Corona center in France. The situation there is bad. Not far from Germany, old corona patients are no longer ventilated. Will that be the case in Baden-Württemberg soon?
Strasbourg / Stuttgart (dpa) - In the face of the corona pandemic, disaster physicians report on dramatic conditions from Alsace that they believe could soon also threaten Germany.
According to this, doctors at the University Hospital of Strasbourg continue to work with corona patients, even if they are infected themselves. People over 80 are no longer ventilated. Instead, "care for the dying with opiates and sleeping pills", the staff of the German Institute for Disaster Medicine in Tübingen wrote in a report to the state government of Baden-Württemberg, which is available to the German Press Agency. Several media reported about it.
The University Hospital of Strasbourg denies that age is the only criterion for intensive care. The practices in force at the university clinic correspond to the recommendations of the current specialist societies, it said in a message. New capacities in the field of intensive care medicine would also be made available, so far there has been no overload.
Alsace is considered the center of France's crisis. The German disaster medicine specialists visited the University Clinic in Strasbourg on Monday - and raise the alarm about the conditions. In the paper, they report a "tangible danger" from the virus. Assuming that the development in Alsace will soon set in Germany, an optimal preparation is of "the utmost urgency". The danger posed by the corona virus makes "further consistent measures by the state governments, hospitals and emergency services in Germany" indispensable.
The patient to be ventilated is the bottleneck, the paper says. Patients older than 80 years have not been ventilated at the Strasbourg clinic since the weekend. The same goes for patients in nursing homes at that age who need ventilation. The emergency services should provide you with "quick death care". The ethics committee specifies this procedure.
The German Patient Protection Foundation sharply criticizes the French approach based on age. Age or origin are unlikely to play a role in medical aid, said board member Eugen Brysch. "Rather, the focus is on the patient's will and the medical prognosis." It is important for the patients to express their will in good time, for example with a living will. German intensive care and emergency medicine specialists presented clinical-ethical recommendations for the care of intensive care patients on Thursday. The criterion is therefore the clinical prospect of success of the treatment - not the age. With the handout conditions like in France should be avoided, says Brysch.
According to the report, the Strasbourg clinic admitted one patient every hour who needed ventilation. 90 ventilation beds were available at the time; the clinic is currently expanding its capacities. Patients between the ages of 19 and 80 are ventilated there, whereby only 3 of the 90 patients were younger than 50 and had no previous illnesses. At the university hospital, only one vital bypass operation is carried out per day, there is no longer any tumor surgery and no outpatient surgery. All patients who are able to walk and whose health is acceptable have been discharged.
The Robert Koch Institute (RKI) classified the eastern French regions of Alsace and Lorraine as coronavirus risk areas around two weeks ago. The Champagne-Ardenne region, which shares a border with Belgium, is also considered a risk area. The three areas together form the Grand Est region. It borders on Baden-Württemberg, the Saarland and Rhineland-Palatinate. French President Emmanuel Macron announced a military operation to support the population when he visited a new mobile army clinic in Mulhouse, Alsace, on Wednesday evening.
According to the regional health authority, 3,068 people with Sars CoV-2 infection were hospitalized by Wednesday. Almost 651 of these were in intensive care units. Since the pandemic started, more than 500 deaths have been reported across the region. A special train with 20 Corona patients on board left Strasbourg for western France on Thursday to relieve the intensive care units in the affected region.
The German healthcare system is still well positioned, it said on Thursday in the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of the Interior. But take the situation in Alsace as a "warning example on the horizon". Work on the virus was to be intensified further.
Intensive care physicians and emergency physicians play a key role in the crisis, the disaster medics report. "The failure of every single person in these areas will ultimately cost people their lives." Therefore, a special role must apply to these specialists. France also allows infected doctors to work. "The work is only interrupted for a few days if there is a confirmed infection and your own symptoms," the doctors write about the French emergency services.
Because of the corona crisis, doctors also warn of "medical collateral damage". Despite the Corona crisis, people would be entitled to adequate treatment, for example for heart attacks or accidents. "In the end, we must not lose all of these patients in order to have saved all Covid 19 patients."