The Dachau Clinic was probably lucky: As of Sunday evening, none of the approximately 200 patients and only seven of the 1,000 employees were infected with the coronavirus, which a patient from the Starnberg district had previously introduced into the hospital undetected. The clinic wants to resume care in some areas already today.
The “stroke unit”, the special stroke station at the Dachau Helios Amper Clinic, has a good reputation far beyond the borders of the district. For this reason, on March 24, a patient who had previously been treated for heart problems in a hospital in the Starnberg district was transferred to Dachau. As a so-called "non-covid patient".
The problem: The man was a "Covid patient", which was only discovered a week later, after numerous fellow patients had been transferred "to almost all wards" and nurses had contact across the wards. The clinic immediately informed the Dachau health department and, because the number of contact persons for the patient could no longer be clearly tracked, proposed the immediate, provisional closure. "The notification and initiative came from Helios himself," confirms District Administrator Stefan Löwl, who is now working with the crisis team in the District Office, the Health Department and the clinic responsible for a solution to the problem - for the benefit of all patients and employees. Since Friday, the clinic closure in Dachau has affected both the individual wards and the emergency department, midwife and on-call practice.
It is "pure coincidence" that the Helios Clinic Munich West in Pasing only had to be closed two days before the Dachau Clinic. There, 14 patients and two employees had been tested positive for the coronavirus at various wards. However, Löwl points to the realm of conspiracy theories that the corona virus came to the large district town via the Essen clinic, which is delivered from Pasing to Dachau. Because: “The food is not made by a Pasinger cook, but comes from the vicinity of Würzburg and is only distributed further through Pasing.” All investigations currently clearly indicate that the virus affects the heart attack patients from the Starnberg district spread in the Dachau hospital.
It was probably a stroke of luck: The testing of patients and employees at the Helios Amper Clinic in Dachau on Friday showed until Sunday evening that no further infection had been found in the nearly 200 patients; however, the test results from 40 patients are still open. The results are already available from over half of the more than 1,000 employees; Here, seven people actually tested positive and have now been placed in quarantine at home by the health department. The pending results should be available by noon today.
The further procedure now stipulates that all employees of the Amper clinics should now be checked in tight, risk group-specific test cycles. "To do this, the test capacities have to be increased significantly," as the health authority reports. In addition, all clinic areas would be "structurally and organizationally separated as possible". The canteens and cafeteria would now also be closed to the employees or switched to “take-away” and the regular handover talks would be restructured when the shift changed.
The aim of all of these, including structural measures, is to put the various areas in the Amper Clinic back into operation as quickly as possible. Obstetrics, for example, is scheduled to start as early as Monday. The KVB standby practice and outpatient emergency aid are now open to all patients again, according to the district office. Inpatient admission, also for non-Covid patients, "is likely to be possible again from the middle of next week".
Sure, one admits at the health office, the Covid tests are not reliable in that they can only recognize infected people, show the symptoms or have already formed antibodies against the virus; however, the blood does not form these antibodies until the second week of infection at the earliest, which means that a caregiver who has contracted the Covid 19 patient could still pass the test on Friday as corona negative. "But what is the alternative?" Asks Löwl. “Even with the infection in the old people's home in Dachau-Ost, we had to let the staff continue to work despite contact and an infection that cannot be excluded. We can't shut down the whole company! ”In other hospitals and old people's homes, the same thing is done across the country as in Dachau.
Six people from the Dachau district - two of them on weekends - have died as a result of a corona infection. The Covid-19 patient from the Starnberg district also lost the fight against the virus at the weekend. 40 Covid patients are currently being treated in Dachau.