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Karl Lauterbach
Photo: CHRISTIAN MANG / AFP
At a joint press conference, Federal Health Minister Karl Lauterbach, the head of the Robert Koch Institute Lothar Wieler and medical specialist Christian Karagiannidis commented on the current corona situation in Germany.
They were cautiously optimistic.
According to Health Minister Lauterbach (SPD), the federal government has the omicron wave "well under control" so far.
Nevertheless, he expects that the number of new infections could rise to up to 400,000, he says in Berlin.
The main thing now is to protect the older unvaccinated people so that the sick do not end up in the intensive care unit.
Germany has a comparatively high number of unvaccinated older people, four times as many as England and three times as many as Italy, says Lauterbach.
Lauterbach draws an interim balance. This is “positive so far”, despite high incidences. Lauterbach's goal is to "control" and "minimize" the consequences of the wave. Lauterbach explains that the risk of dying with a corona infection decreases by 99 percent with a booster: “Please get boosters. Don't wait for vaccines that are still being developed," says Lauterbach. In addition, they are working on a new regulation for free testing from isolation, they want to “present a new test strategy” and revise the contact person tracking. According to Lauterbach, all three rules are already being worked on with the federal states.
In the omicron wave, the RKI primarily wants to pay attention to the disease burden of the virus.
Although the number of infections is increasing, the very serious cases are relatively small, says RKI boss Lothar Wieler.
"We're gaining time every day," he says, referring to additional vaccinations.
However, the number of hospital admissions is increasing.
Now head for the peak of the wave.
Now the focus must be even more on protecting risk groups.
According to the intensive care doctor Karagiannidis, the situation in the intensive care units in Germany is “acceptable”. A little more than 2,000 people are currently affected nationwide, says the member of the Federal Government's Expert Council in Berlin. It can be observed that the number of Delta patients is decreasing. For seven to ten days, however, the number of new admissions to hospitals has been rising again slightly. This is clearly due to the omicron variant.
The RKI recently reported a significant increase in the nationwide seven-day incidence and thus a new high.
The RKI gave the value of new infections per 100,000 inhabitants and week on Friday morning as 1073.0.
For comparison: the day before the value was 1017.4.
A week ago, the nationwide incidence was 706.3 (previous month: 215.6).
The health authorities in Germany reported 190,148 new corona infections to the RKI within one day.
This is evident from numbers that reflect the status of the RKI dashboard at 5 a.m.
A week ago there were 140,160 infections.
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asc/dpa/Reuters
