Enlarge image
Christian Drosten
Photo: Julia Steinigeweg / DER SPIEGEL
Christian Drosten, Director of the Institute for Virology at the Berlin Charité, warns against willfully becoming infected with the corona virus in summer.
"One should continue to avoid this as much as possible, also because of the risk of Long Covid," said Drosten in an interview with SPIEGEL.
The recommendation for infection, which is currently making the rounds on Twitter, is also epidemiological: “Total nonsense”: “So many people cannot become infected in the summer that this would keep the corona numbers low in the winter.”
Drosten fears “very high case numbers again” for September.
The number of hospitalizations and deaths then probably rose again.
»If the decision-makers do nothing, there will be a lot of illness-related absences from work.
That will be a real problem, "Drosten fears.
"That makes me even more worried about autumn"
It is unlikely that intensive care units will be overcrowded.
However, the new subvariant BA.5, which is becoming dominant in Germany, may again affect the lower airways more severely.
"The wheel is turning more in the direction of illness again," says Drosten.
It is not true that a virus automatically becomes more and more harmless in the course of evolution.
»That makes me even more worried about autumn.«
He was publicly involved in the pandemic because he felt that as a scientist he could "do the most for society," says Drosten in an interview with SPIEGEL.
But if he "had known how much negative feedback would come back from a very loud minority, how certain circles would systematically try to turn public and political opinion in a certain direction, then I wouldn't have done it.
That really shocked me,” said Drosten.
“Really perplexed” makes him that he sometimes has the feeling “that those in the loud minority who reinterpret and twist everything simply have the staying power – maybe also because they seem to spend the whole day just doing that and have nothing better to do."
While he and many other scientists are now slowly getting tired and urgently need and want to go back to normal operations, “these people just don’t keep silent, they always get a stage.
I find that very worrying, "said Drosten in the SPIEGEL interview.
It was "wrong" to vacate his post in the expert committee set up by the federal government and the Bundestag, which is supposed to examine, among other things, how much certain corona protection measures have achieved.
"Maybe I should have been more robust and said: I know that I'm not biased, it doesn't matter what some newspapers write - let them write," says Drosten in the SPIEGEL interview.
External help, which the committee of experts, which was composed "politically and not according to scientific criteria", urgently needed, was not granted, "because only personally appointed people could work," as Drosten had been told.
The task was therefore “unachievable” – according to Drosten, this was “one of the main reasons” for his withdrawal from the committee.
The fact that it has now also become known that "ghostwriters who are not known by name were involved in the commission's report is personally unacceptable to me," said Drosten.
»And that, I have to say, makes the work of this commission open to criticism for me as a citizen and as a scientist.«
"I guess I've just been lucky so far"
He himself recommends wearing a mask indoors in winter, which is “the least painful”.
If you manage to “immunize up to 40 million people or provide them with a booster vaccination” before winter, for example by urgently calling for company vaccinations, that would “really change something,” said Drosten.
In the long term, getting infected is unavoidable.
Gradually, a mucous membrane-specific protection is formed, which makes the overall population immunity more resilient.
On the other hand, the virus is also evolving and increasingly evading the immune response.
He assumes that at some point a new equilibrium will settle in: the population's immunity through vaccinations and infections will eventually be so strong that the virus will become less important.
"Then we are in an endemic state," says Drosten.
In the worst case, however, this could take “a few more winters”.
Drosten himself has not yet been infected with Sars-Cov-2: "So far I've just been lucky.
I rarely put myself in risky situations, but I'm not overly cautious either."