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Intensive care unit in Rostock: You can estimate how full it will be
Photo: Bernd Wüstneck / dpa
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The intensive care physicians in Germany warn and warn and warn - and are often not heard in politics at the moment.
On Thursday, Christian Karagiannidis, head of the intensive care register of the German Interdisciplinary Association for Intensive and Emergency Medicine (DIVI), became even clearer.
The intensive care units in Germany could be overcrowded in four weeks, he warned in the "Rheinische Post" and pointed out that it was not about painting horror pictures.
Instead, the warnings are covered by numbers.
In fact, it is getting more and more crowded in intensive care units in Germany - there is no sign of a trend reversal.
Around 3700 Covid-19 patients in intensive care units
According to the Divi-Register, more than 3,700 people are currently being treated with Covid-19 in intensive care units in German clinics (see graphic below), a good half of whom are invasively ventilated.
This is not yet a critical amount, but the numbers have been increasing steadily since the openings in early March.
In that month alone, around 1000 Covid 19 patients were added.
If the trend continues, capacity will be reached in less than four weeks, explained Karagiannidis.
According to the bill, around 4,700 intensive care beds with Covid-19 patients should be occupied by the beginning of May without significant countermeasures.
In mid-December, Bund and Länger imposed another hard lockdown at around this level of utilization.
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After the shutdown, however, it took another two and a half weeks until the number of intensive care beds filled with Covid 19 patients fell again.
At the beginning of January there were 5762 people with the disease in an intensive care unit.
The problem: The intensive care units fill up with some delay to the infection numbers.
It will take two to three weeks for people who are infected with Sars-CoV-2 to become so seriously ill that they may need intensive medical treatment.
How full it will then be, however, can be estimated.
5000 Covid-19 intensive care patients in early May
Detailed forecasts by DIVI from mid-March 2021 show that development could currently go in a direction similar to that in December.
By the beginning of May, the load on the wards is likely to rise to around 5,000 Covid-19 patients - if, on average throughout Germany, it is only possible to reduce the spread of the virus and the higher UV- Radiation in the spring slows the virus somewhat.
If the federal states and districts, as actually agreed, had taken consistent countermeasures with a seven-day incidence of 100, according to the modeling, however, the utilization could have been stopped at around 3000 Covid-19 intensive care patients.
The seven-day incidence throughout Germany is currently 134.2 infections per day - and the trend is rising.
The federal states have been struggling to take consistent measures against the virus for months.
The result is a constant change between tough shutdown measures and early easing, which ultimately lead to another shutdown - with the known consequences for companies and private life.
To make matters worse, the significantly more contagious and probably more deadly mutant B.1.17 has been spreading since December 2020.
It now causes almost 90 percent of infections in Germany and thus also contributes significantly to the increase in the number of patients in intensive care units.
The fact that an ever greater proportion of younger people are becoming infected as the vaccination progresses (read more about this here) only helps to a limited extent.
A smaller proportion of those under the age of 60 become seriously ill with Covid-19.
If this group is infected in large numbers in the uncontrolled pandemic, the number of seriously ill people will continue to be high.
In addition, the younger age groups do not die as often from Covid-19, but they sometimes spend longer on the wards, which also ties up capacities.
Cancel operations, put off patients
The feared 5000 Covid 19 patients in May could supply German intensive care units - in January there were finally significantly more full beds.
The question is, at what price.
Because the more Covid 19 patients are treated intensively, the more other areas have to be restricted.
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Another reason are personnel bottlenecks.
The medical staff is already heavily burdened after a pandemic for over a year.
Covid 19 intensive care patients need close care because their condition can worsen very suddenly.
"This is not too much of a technical challenge, it is physical and psychological," Divi doctors warned in March.
"If we do nothing now and the nurses leave, we will have an existential problem in intensive care!", Divi member Felix Walcher said on Wednesday
Of the total of 26,807 intensive care beds available in Germany, 84 percent are currently occupied (see graphic below).
4,167 beds are free.
There is also an emergency reserve of around 11,000 beds that would be ready for use within a week.
However, the capacities are not only needed for people who contract Covid-19, but for all people who need intensive medical help.
Patients with heart attacks and strokes need to be cared for, just like people after major operations or accidents, and there is always a need for a buffer for unexpected events.
More than two-thirds of the beds are currently filled with people in need of medical help regardless of the pandemic - almost 19,000.
If the number of seriously Covid 19 patients increases, this means above all that other patients are left behind - as far as it is somehow justifiable.
In the past year, numerous, plannable operations were postponed, including cancer patients in some cases had to wait for interventions in order to create capacity for seriously ill Sars-CoV-22 infected people.
Better data on Covid-19 patients in hospitals
Experts had actually hoped that it would be possible to gradually reduce the backlog of operations.
But that is difficult as long as there is no turnaround in sight due to the increasing number of infections.
In order to make it even clearer what the pandemic means for the hospitals, the University Clinic Bonn, together with 34 other university clinics, has now developed an overview page that can be used to record the total number of Covid 19 patients in the clinics in real time - Cases treated on an outpatient basis and in a normal ward are also included here.
So far, only information from the university hospitals in Aachen, Berlin, Bonn, Erlangen, Halle (Saale), Jena, Leipzig, Ulm and Munich has been recorded.
However, the information shows: Most of the 22,600 Covid-19 sufferers treated in the above-mentioned hospitals were younger than 60.
However, mainly people between 50 and 90 years of age were treated as inpatients.
Especially at the lower end of this range, the numbers are likely to continue to rise in the coming weeks, and with them the warnings from hospitals if the virus cannot spread.
