"These long courses have seen the devil": Interview with Corona coordinator Dr.

Joerg Lohse

Created: 08/11/2022, 14:42

By: Peter Borchers

Thanks to Wiesn, autumn and winter: Dr.

Jörg Lohse, family doctor and corona coordinator of the district, expects the pandemic to gain new momentum.

The Wiesn will take place, and hopefully I'll be recovered enough afterwards to issue many hundreds of sick notes.

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Jörg Lohse fears that the Oktoberfest will become a super spreader.

© sh/Archive

Hardly anyone is currently talking about the pandemic.

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Jörg Lohse considers this dangerous - and warns of a new big wave in autumn.

Bad Tölz-Wolfratshausen/Münsing

– The football stadiums are packed to the brim, major concerts and festivals are well attended, and anyone who wears a mask in the supermarket now feels like an extraterrestrial.

The Covid-19 pandemic seems to have largely disappeared from public awareness these summer months - or at least repressed it.

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Jörg Lohse considers this to be dangerous.

“Obviously, laisser-faire has taken a very deep toll on many,” says the experienced Münsinger family doctor and district corona coordinator in an interview with editor Peter Borchers.

Dr.

Lohse, the Ukraine war, the energy crisis, increasing inflation and people's longing for summer fun seem to have overlaid the fear of infection with Corona.

Hardly anyone wears a mask, major events with thousands of people are the order of the day.

We still have a pandemic.

The incidences are high, people become seriously ill and die.

How do you see that as a doctor?

If you only look at the incidences, it is difficult to assess the situation.

In the most recent circular, I advised my medical colleagues to call in sick and isolate people with a positive rapid test and the typical symptoms.

You don't need the health department and a PCR test for this, it all costs resources and money.

People are not stupid and now know very well what to do in the event of an infection.

For this reason, I am sure that the decrease in incidence in our district is not keeping pace with reality.

So there are a lot more people sick than the numbers would lead us to believe?

By far.

I can confirm that from my own practice.

When only a few people were affected, we feverishly searched for chains of infection and sources of infection.

Now we have infections left and right, above and below, a mass phenomenon.

You then have to be very careful to find your way out of the alarmism and back to normality.

Normality sounds a little strange in this context, but Corona is just a norm right now.

(By the way: everything from the region is now also available in our regular Wolfratshausen-Geretsried newsletter.)

Corona: "At the moment there is a lot of personal responsibility"

However, the impression arises that most people currently see the pandemic a little too normally and care little about it.

There's a kind of laissez-faire vibe...

...and I think that's pretty dangerous.

My wife and I just went shopping and we were almost the only ones wearing masks.

I don't know the personal background of each individual.

One or the other may have just had Corona and think they are invulnerable because they are full of antibodies.

At the moment there is a lot of personal responsibility.

Worryingly, laissez-faire has become very widespread among many, so that it borders on dangerous repression.

On the other hand, we also have to look for ways to get out of this basic mood of catastrophe.

It's a difficult tightrope walk.

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On which people move very differently.

Right.

Some repress like mad because they hear and read very little about Corona.

The others are careful.

Personally, I count myself among the relaxed mindful ones.

I like meeting people, I also ratchet on the garden fence.

But if situations become confusing, I put on a mask.

I always wear them in shops because I don't know what to expect there and who blew the air before.

By the way, I recently received an invitation to a box in a tent at the Wiesn.

Of course I declined.

Keyword Wiesn: Do you think it will take place?

And if so, doesn't this potential superspreader event have to end in disaster?

In my opinion this is utter madness.

There are forecasts from specialists – I'm just a simple person – that say that it's only after that that things really get going.

People will come to Munich from all over the world, there is no better melting pot.

And nobody will celebrate there with a mask.

That does not work.

But unfortunately the steamer has already left.

The Wiesn will take place, and hopefully I'll be recovered enough afterwards to issue many hundreds of sick notes.

Are you afraid of a giant wave, like a corona tsunami?

The Wiesn will accelerate it, but the coming autumn and winter alone will increase the momentum - I'm sure of that.

The entire country could slide into a dysfunction due to the mass absence of workers due to illness - starting with the fitter on the assembly line at VW, through the childcare workers, the clinic staff, the retail staff to the nursing and rescue services.

That's one.

Secondly, the fact that you only have to be in quarantine for five days after an infection sends the wrong signal that you will be fit again immediately afterwards.

Then you start exercising too early, believing that you are healthy again.

In Austria, the quarantine has already been lifted, and there you can even go to work if you are infected.

This has nothing to do with dealing with Corona in a relaxed manner.

This is complete suppression or trivialization and absolutely negligent.

Covid-19 is not influenza.

I have maybe 50 cases of this in my practice every year.

With Corona I can put a factor of 20 behind it.

And the third topic is Post or Long Covid.

“These long courses have seen the devil”: Lohse with an example

The Institute for General Medicine at the Klinikum Rechts der Isar of the Technical University of Munich, together with the Tölz Health Department and you, did a study on this.

I have young patients with the relatively mild omicron mutation who suffer from it.

One person, in their mid-20s, was athletic, dynamic, fit as a fiddle, and had three vaccinations.

After an infection in the spring, this young individual is still nowhere near his previous level of performance.

It's like a dead battery: You feel recovered, you exercise for half an hour, then you have to quit and pay dearly for it by lying flat for two days.

Or you work four hours during a reintegration and the rest of the day and the weekend are gone.

Attempting to increase from four to five hours results in termination of the reintegration process.

An enormous burden for the person concerned.

Yes, mentally and physically.

Nobody knows right now how it will be for him next year.

We also do not know what this means for the employer.

These long courses have seen the devil.

Various media recently reported that far too few rehab places are available for long-Covid patients, so they have to wait up to nine months for therapy.

I'm careful with that statement.

In our district study, we queried the patient's symptom patterns in detail.

It turns out that there are different clusters of symptom groups.

One is the psychosomatic one: The patient is built close to the water, is plagued by nightmares, suffers from fear of the future and panic attacks, is lacking in motivation and drive.

As already mentioned, another cluster is the fatigue syndrome with massive states of exhaustion.

Then there are the neurological symptoms.

One of my patients is not at all depressed, but has major problems with reading.

You can't do more than five minutes.

She is currently training the lost memory with children's puzzles.

Another symptom cluster is the heart and lungs: people find it very difficult to breathe.

These clusters also partially overlap in patients.

What I mean to say is: Long Covid is not Long Covid.

Targeted treatment is correspondingly difficult.

In the rehabilitation clinics - with laudable exceptions - there is often a standard program: a bit of exercise, talk therapy, a bit of a self-help group, but none of it is very targeted and unfortunately not very successful.

In the long term, because we still have a lot of work ahead of us, we have to try to treat things in a much more differentiated way.

a bit of a self-help group, but not very targeted and unfortunately not very successful.

In the long term, because we still have a lot of work ahead of us, we have to try to treat things in a much more differentiated way.

a bit of a self-help group, but not very targeted and unfortunately not very successful.

In the long term, because we still have a lot of work ahead of us, we have to try to treat things in a much more differentiated way.

Vaccination offers protection – at least against severe courses

Vaccination can offer protection, at least from serious illnesses.

In the district, the rate of fully vaccinated was almost 66 percent at the end of July.

On the other hand, the promised vaccine adapted to the new variants is still a long time coming.

When I ask Biontech when their new vaccine is coming, I get the answer that they can't tell me because they're a public company.

For me that is unthinkable.

According to hearsay, Moderna will be launched in two variants at the end of August.

Novavax is announcing its new vaccine for the fall whenever that should be.

Could it be that by then mutated virus variants will be in circulation again, against which even the adapted vaccines are less effective?

The virologists warn of this, who obviously always have to say something new.

Such statements annoy me.

The fact that the effects of vaccines wear off and they therefore have to be adapted to mutations has been the case ever since they have been around.

We know that from influenza.

The background to such statements are probably new mutations in other parts of the world, against which the vaccines are said to be less effective.

But with us, the Omikron variant is still raging.

So what do you recommend to your patients?

As soon as the new vaccine is available, I will promote it.

Because one thing is for sure: an infection with Omikron does not protect you from not getting sick again three months later.

I would advise healthy people with full vaccination protection to wait until the new, omikron-adapted vaccine is on the market and get vaccinated with it.

Risk patients should wait until the beginning of September at the latest.

If there is nothing new by then, they should have the existing vaccine injected.

I have also vaccinated very old people in the last few weeks, and the demand has actually increased a bit again.

Opponents of vaccination still like to argue that people who have been vaccinated three times get sick.

Yes that is unfortunately so.

My wife and I have been vaccinated three times with Biontech - and we both got Corona.

But the course was very mild.

The long-Covid case I described is also triple-vaccinated.

There is no guarantee.

However, we don't end up in intensive care units, and we don't die either.

Clear, very hard studies clearly show that vaccinated people need intensive care much less frequently.

I think it's just negligent not to get vaccinated a fourth time because you got the corona virus despite the third shot.

Last question: At the beginning of August, two young Spaniards were the first Europeans to die of monkeypox.

Do we already have to prepare for the next pandemic since we are still in the middle of the first?

I don't think it will be dangerous for the general public.

Monkeypox infection may be a danger for risk groups, but apparently a welcome topic for certain media.

(peb)

You can find more current news from the region around Wolfratshausen at Merkur.de/Wolfratshausen.