Rosenheim was the hottest point on the Corona map twice last year.
Nowhere else in the country were there so many infections, measured by population, as in the proper city between Munich and Chiemsee.
Returnees from Ischgl had brought the virus with them, a strong beer festival was ideal for spreading it.
And suddenly Jens Deerberg-Wittram, the managing director of the clinic operator in the city and district, was the most sought-after crisis manager far and wide.
Every fifth of around 1,000 hospital beds was occupied by Covid patients.
Sebastian Balzter
Editor in the economy of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.
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In the intensive care unit, the rate was much higher.
Of 54 beds, 34 were occupied with seriously ill infected people at the top.
"We were downright drowned in corona cases," Deerberg-Wittram describes the situation in retrospect.
He remembers exactly the phone call he made with Prime Minister Markus Söder (CSU).
The politician wanted to know from the hospital director what he needed to increase the capacity: more masks, more ventilators?
"So I told him: The best thing would be a helicopter to take intensive care patients to other clinics."
That sounded threatening, almost like in a disaster movie.
But there was a cool analysis behind it.
Overall, there is no shortage of intensive care beds in Germany.
In terms of population, no other country in Europe has more of them than Germany (
see graphic
).
That was true even before the outbreak of the epidemic.
It applied during the first, second, and third corona waves, even if it wasn't mentioned often.
And it is even more true now.
What the problem is
In the disease year 2020, the beds in the intensive care units were actually less occupied than they had been for a long time because of many canceled operations; the proportion of intensive care beds occupied by Covid patients averaged four percent and even in the worst phase of a data analysis by the TU Berlin and the Essen economic research institute RWI never well above 20 percent. In other words: even if individual intensive care units were temporarily overloaded and the doctors and nurses worked to the point of exhaustion, there were still plenty of free places elsewhere. Or as it sounded from Rosenheim in the spring: Helicopters were needed, no more beds.
Not only in Rosenheim, however, a completely different impression quickly established itself. In the past year and a half, the whole of Germany worried week to week whether the hospitals in the country were well enough equipped to adequately care for all seriously ill Covid patients. It was mainly about the quantity. In addition to the number of infections, the occupancy rate of the intensive care units was determined by the German Interdisciplinary Association for Intensive and Emergency Medicine (Divi), on a rush order from the Ministry of Health, as the decisive factor for the corona policy, for lockdown and opening. Federal Health Minister Jens Spahn (CDU) set the tone when he offered a bonus of 50,000 euros for each additional intensive care bed; The federal government has spent almost 700 million euros on it.
The sheer number of beds in all of Germany was never the crux of the matter. The problem is how the basically abundant capacity is distributed across the country. And what it is used for. There was already a lack of coordination and strategy; the epidemic just made that clear again. The FAS spoke to intensive care physicians and nurses, health economists and clinic managers to get to the bottom of the matter and to explore the special relationship between Germans and the intensive care unit.