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Intensive care unit in a London hospital
Photo: Victoria Jones / dpa
The benefits of vaccinations against the coronavirus should actually have long been known.
But the German vaccination quota speaks a different language: According to the latest surveys on the minimum vaccination quota by the Robert Koch Institute, only around 70.8 percent of the total population are vaccinated twice - this corresponds to almost 59 million people.
Data from Great Britain show once again that vaccination is worthwhile.
According to this, unvaccinated people have a 60-fold higher risk of ending up in the intensive care unit compared with vaccinated people.
This is the conclusion reached by the Intensive Care National Audit and Research Center (ICNARC), an organization that evaluates hospital data.
The experts had evaluated which people had to be treated for Covid-19 in hospitals in England, Wales and Northern Ireland between May and November.
There are also clear differences among younger people
For 60 to 70 year olds who were double vaccinated, the average admission rate was 0.6 cases per 100,000 inhabitants per week.
For those who weren't vaccinated, the number rose to 37.3 per 100,000 people within seven days, or 60 times.
In younger patients, the difference was no longer as great, but it was still significant. People who were not vaccinated between 30 and 40 years of age had to be treated ten to 15 times more often for Covid-19 than people of the same age who were twice vaccinated. A graph published by ICNARC on Twitter shows data for different regions in the UK. The curves document how the numbers in the intensive care units fluctuated in unvaccinated patients and were very high at the beginning of May, while they fell in the summer. They rose again by September or October at the latest.
In Germany, vaccination numbers have stagnated somewhat over the holidays, as expected.
Carsten Breuer, the head of the Corona crisis team, admitted that the hoped-for vaccination rate of 80 percent would not be achieved by the next federal-state conference on January 7th.
So far, around 74 percent have received at least one vaccine dose.
His estimate is slightly higher than the RKI's numbers.
The institute speaks of a minimum vaccination quota, as 100% coverage cannot be achieved by the reporting system.
The actual vaccination rate could be up to five percentage points higher, it says.
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