Twice as many Covid patients in intensive care as weeks ago

Some intensive care units in Hessen are full, on average it is not quite as bad as in other federal states.

The hospital society sees a north-south divide.

Frankfurt / Main - The number of Covid-19 patients in Hessian clinics has more than doubled in the past four weeks.

This applies both to the Frankfurt / Offenbach supply area and to the entire state, said Jürgen Graf, medical director of the Frankfurt University Clinic and head of the planning team for the nationwide distribution of Covid patients.

The utilization of both the normal wards and the intensive care units is "very high". "If the number of Covid-19 cases continues to rise, this will put a lot of strain on the clinics and the capacities for other medical services will have to be reduced," Graf told the German press agency. Graf emphasized: "The vast majority of Covid 19 patients who are currently being treated are not fully vaccinated."

If the intensive capacities for Covid patients had to be expanded, wards would have to be reorganized again - as was the case last winter. "A division according to buildings is not planned again," explained Graf. In 2020, the University Hospital operated an organizationally independent clinic in Building 23, in which people infected with the coronavirus were treated spatially separated from the other patients. In the course of the pandemic, people learned "that we can guarantee safe care without separating the buildings into Covid and non-Covid patients," said Graf.

According to the intensive care register of the German Interdisciplinary Association for Intensive and Emergency Medicine (DIVI), 1661 of 1817 available intensive care beds in Hesse were occupied on Thursday afternoon.

Almost 14 percent of these intensive care patients were Covid 19 cases.

Of the 251 Covid-19 cases, 117 were invasively ventilated.

The number of Covid patients in Hesse's intensive care units has been growing again since the beginning of October, as the DIVI time series shows.

The low point of this year was reached on June 30th, when 37 Covid-19 patients were in Hesse's intensive care units.

The maximum was counted on January 5, when 523 Covid 19 patients in the state received intensive care.

Corona does not only burden the large specialist clinics, said the director of the Hessian Hospital Society, Steffen Gramminger: "Mastering a pandemic is a team effort".

The more Covid 19 patients treated in the large centers, the more the small houses are needed as overflow pools.

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They not only accept patients from normal wards, but also intensive care patients, even with ventilation.

According to the hospital society in Hessen, 80 "cooperating" hospitals are ready to relieve the 8 "coordinating" specialist clinics.

Currently, one sees a north-south divide in Hessen, said Gramminger: In the south - also in the area - there are hardly any intensive care beds available, in the north there is still a little more capacity.

"There are regional bottlenecks," says Gramminger, on average it is not yet as dramatic as in Bavaria or Saxony, for example.

dpa