“We are on the edge”: Germany’s hospitals under stress in the face of the new wave of coronavirus

Due to the lack of places in the intensive care unit, the staff of the Bavarian hospital in Freising (south) transferred a patient from coronavirus covid-19 to an establishment in northern Italy, an unprecedented measure in Germany since the beginning of the pandemic.

In the 18 months of the pandemic, German hospitals have been regularly requested to care for patients from overwhelmed European countries.

SIGHT: Germany transfers first patients abroad due to hospital pressure due to coronavirus: “Services are saturated”

However, since October, With the new wave of covid-19, Europe’s first economy is wondering how long its healthcare system will last.

“Last week we had to transfer a patient to Merano (Italy) because we did not have reception capacity, and the surrounding Bavarian hospitals were also full”, explains to AFP Thomas Marx, medical director of the hospital in Freising, a city of 50,000 inhabitants.

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With an incidence rate of 550 infections per 100,000 inhabitants in seven days, Bavaria is one of the regions most affected by this rebound in the epidemic.

“We are at the limit of our capabilities”, explains Dr. Marx, 43, worried. His intensive care unit currently has 13 patients, “three more than our usual capacity,” he says. Five of them have covid-19, all unvaccinated.

At the national level, The number of coronavirus patients in intensive care remains below the peak reached at the end of 2020, but hospitals are more vulnerable due to severe shortages of healthcare personnel.

“There is no single threshold from which we can say that now the entire health system will collapse”says Gerald Gass, President of the German Hospital Association. But there are already “warning signs,” he told the Handelsblatt newspaper this week, citing tensions in hospitals in Bavaria and Thüringe, another particularly affected region.

Exhausted staff

At the hospital Freising, Dr. Marx describes “a great misunderstanding” of the hospital staff before the deterioration of the situation that was, according to him, “foreseeable and could have been avoided”.

With a rate of 67.7%, Germany it does not stand out among Western European countries as one of the most vaccinated.

On Thursday, parliament will urgently pass a bill re-establishing restrictions to try to stop the rise in new daily infections – between 30,000 and 50,000 this week.

The plan foresees a massive return to teleworking and the need for a health pass to use transport.

The text prepared by the government coalition, which will soon succeed the majority of Angela Merkel, should allow the Länder to take measures targeting unvaccinated people.

Several regions, including Berlin, already prohibit access to cultural events, sports and even restaurants.

The situation is this time much more delicate in German hospitals since they have “4,000 less intensive care beds than a year ago due to exhausted health personnel, who left his job or reduced his working time ”, explains Gernot Marx, President of the German Association of Intensive Care Medicine (DIVI).

A shortage faced daily by Dr. Niklas Schneider, head of the intensive care service at the Munich Schwabing clinic. “We have much less specialized personnel than during the first waves (of COVID-19 cases).”

As in Freising, his intensive care unit is at full capacity and Dr. Schneider speaks of a “catastrophic” situation.

According to Spiegel magazine, only a quarter of the 1,300 intensive care units can function at full capacity, due to understaffing.

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