Corona shocks Germany with a new sad climax: Within one day, 1244 people died from it.
Four virus experts analyze why the numbers are not falling.
In Munich * and the rest of the country, the number of infections and victims of the
coronavirus
remains
at a high level.
Why do the statistics about
Sars-CoV-2 show
no improvement?
We asked specialists for their opinion.
Serious
omissions on the part of the federal government come
to light.
And from numerous citizens?
Munich - The
corona intensive care units
are more and more a matter of life and death.
In the fight against lonely death, some doctors and nurses turn a blind eye.
Unlike at the beginning of the pandemic, they enable relatives to say goodbye briefly.
Often not much longer than a few minutes.
Because the silent Corona heroes have been working on the verge of collapse for weeks anyway.
Nevertheless, they cannot prevent the virus from claiming more and more victims.
Many of their seriously ill patients die faster than their fellow sufferers in the spring.
Munich intensive care physicians are revealing a bitter, macabre truth behind closed doors: Recently, the
occupancy of the intensive care beds has
even decreased somewhat.
But not because the situation fundamentally relaxed, but because the virus claimed so many victims in a short period of time - despite the lockdown that lasted for weeks.
Munich: Hospitals with bottlenecks in the removal of corpses - a major omission
According to information from our newspaper, there were even temporary
bottlenecks in the removal of the bodies
in
some Munich clinics
.
The background: a very large number of intensive care patients belong to the generation of the very old, many of them were recently admitted to clinics from old people's and nursing homes.
"The elderly are mainly affected by the high mortality," says the
Tübingen infectiologist Professor Peter Kremsner
, who also heads the approval study for the corona vaccine by the Mainz company CureVac.
“Almost 95 percent of corona deaths are over 65 years old,” Kremsner calculates.
"However, we have known that since the beginning of the pandemic." Nevertheless,
little has been done to
protect old people's and nursing homes
- despite all promises of improvement made by politicians.
“What has been missed here is a tragedy,” says
virologist Prof. Alexander Kekulé
from the University of Halle and calls for a task force from the federal states to finally better support home operators in protecting against infection.
"FFP2 protective masks * and tests alone do not provide adequate protection against infections," added the
infectiologist associate professor Dr.
Christoph Spinner
from the University Hospital on the right of the Isar.
"The state could certainly provide more support here."
His colleague
Prof. Jonas Schmidt-Chanasit
from the University of Hamburg
agrees
: “The lockdown, as practiced in Germany, does not adequately protect the residents of old people's and nursing homes.
One of the goals of the lockdown was to have an indirect effect on the homes by lowering the number of infections in the general population.
That didn't work well. ”However, the reduction in the number of infections has so far not been successful.
Munich: Why are the corona infection numbers not decreasing?
Suspicion arises
Even the experts can only speculate about why
so many people are still
infected
despite the
week-long lockdown
.
“One assumption is obvious: Apparently, over the Christmas holidays and the New Year, more people than we wanted met in larger and, above all, in changing groups.
The younger ones in particular may not have taken the contact restrictions very seriously. "
The truth also includes: There is hardly a deterrent example among the young people themselves, as the infectiologist Kremsner makes clear with an example: "About half of all people die of malaria and Ebola when they get the disease for the first time and receive no therapy - no matter if you are 20 or 80 years old.
Young, healthy people, on the other hand, have next to nothing to fear from Covid-19 *.
Only
a few will ever get sick
- and if so, they are healthy again after one or two days.
Your risk of dying from Corona is practically zero.
This is why it is often difficult to convey to them that compliance with the protective measures depends on them.
The problem is still: you could run the virus into your family and then
your uncle or grandma
could
die
.
But not only many youngsters are weak in the corona discipline.
"Many can no longer understand the restrictions," says the virologist Kekulé.
“Sometimes they don't even get tested when they have symptoms because they don't want to deal with the health department.
The group of annoyed people is growing.
Perhaps they have neglected to explain to them better why the measures are necessary. "
Munich: mutated corona viruses?
"Circulating with us for weeks"
But politicians are mainly talking about further tightening the lockdown - also against the background of new virus variants, for example from Great Britain.
Schmidt-Chanasit reveals a wrong focus: “The new virus variants have been circulating in us for weeks.
You are apparently not responsible for the currently high number of infections in Germany. "
His colleague Kekulé also considers the mutated
virus debate
to be excessive.
“There will still be many virus variants.
Even if one or the other mutation may be particularly contagious - it is crucial that we do not lose sight of priority, and that consists in closing the aforementioned gaps in the protective measures. "
Corona is still the same enemy, says Kekulé: "Whether he has a slightly better rifle is not decisive.
The key is to get out of the line of fire. ”
* Tz.de is an offer from the Ippen Digital Network
