Unlike at the beginning of the pandemic, more than 800,000 tests are now available per week in Germany. The question now is: when is a test useful?
Berlin (dpa) - The Robert Koch Institute (RKI) has recommended extending the tests to the coronavirus. Even with mild symptoms, tests should be carried out immediately, the earlier the better, said RKI President Lothar Wieler.
A general test of the population without symptoms is not advisable. Depending on the situation, however, it makes sense to protect risk groups better with more frequent tests - for example in hospitals, old people's homes and nursing homes. Because infected people could excrete the virus before they felt symptoms.
"It is good to test the 800,000 people in nursing homes systematically and repeatedly," said Eugen Brysch, board member of the German Foundation for Patient Protection of the German Press Agency. "However, the 300,000 residents in assisted living facilities and the hundreds of thousands of elderly care workers must also be included in this scheme." Sustainable infection protection is also necessary. Because there is no vaccine available for the foreseeable future.
Medical officers who are very close to the infection happen to be more critical of the recommendations of the RKI. Even regular tests in institutions for the elderly only provide false security, said Patrick Larscheid, medical officer in the Reinickendorf district of Berlin with around 265,000 inhabitants. If people consistently work with hygiene measures, the residents are well protected. The prerequisite is that enough and, above all, sufficiently qualified staff with appropriate rules of conduct work in one facility. "That is the greatest security." Personnel should not change areas - and of course sufficient protective material must be available.
According to Wieler, the value for infections in Germany - the number of reproductions - is currently 0.76. A value of 0.75 is noted in the management report on Wednesday (data status on April 29, midnight). This means that one person is less infected than another. "This is a gratifying development," said Wieler. However, the institute now uses a so-called four-day mean for estimating the current new infections and thus also the number of reproductions. A three-day mean was previously used. Nothing changes in the result, Wieler emphasized when asked at the online press conference.
Public health officer Larscheid warned against focusing on individual numerical values. "There is no point in stiffening to a reproduction number of 0.7 or 0.9. We have to watch the trends." Otherwise the big picture will be out of sight. "We have to keep infection numbers low. And for me in the district, they're just going up again."
The pure number of reproductions is also associated with great uncertainties. "This is an epidemiological problem. In practice, you can only say in very few cases exactly how many people have been infected. There will always be contacts we don't know." If the real total number is not known, projections would also be on shaky legs. Reproduction figures alone could therefore not be the basis for political decisions. "The only thing we can talk about is the new diseases that we see - given the existing diseases."
According to RKI, 1,000 to 1,500 people are infected with the virus every day in Germany. Last week it was 2000. However, the reporting data arrives at the RKI from the federal states with a delay of a few days.
Even after more than two months, Germany was at the beginning of a marathon that nobody knew when it would end, said Wieler. A majority of the scientists do not consider a second or third wave of infection to be ruled out, as long as there are no vaccines or medicines against the new virus - and no "brilliant concepts" as to how the pathogen could not spread. The immunity of people who have gone through the infection is still not assessable.
According to the RKI numbers, 6,288 people in Germany have died in connection with Covid-19. The average age was 81 years. According to the RKI, the death rate is currently 4 percent. That means that four percent of the Covid-19 infected so far have died. However, he continues to assume in Germany that more people will die from Covid-19 than are officially registered, said Wieler.