Briefly one hopes that it is an old message from last year, but it is current, from Monday of this week: After a corona outbreak in a senior citizen's home in Schorfheide in Brandenburg, 44 residents and 15 employees fell ill with Covid-19, eleven Residents have died.

How the virus got into the home is still unclear, according to the district.

But causes a lot of stir: only half of the employees are vaccinated against Corona.

Britta Beeger

Editor in business.

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Outbreaks like this one come back almost every day. In Bad Doberan in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, 17 residents died after a major corona outbreak, and six in a facility in Norderstedt in Schleswig-Holstein. There are no isolated cases: in the third week of October alone, outbreaks in 122 old people's and nursing homes and 93 deaths were reported to the Robert Koch Institute (RKI). Thanks to the vaccinations, despite the high number of infections, far fewer residents are currently affected than last winter

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, and many infections are rather mild. But the reality in November 2021 is: people in old people's and nursing homes are dying from Corona again.

This is exactly what shouldn't happen anymore.

In the first and second wave there were at least 29,000 corona deaths in old people's and nursing homes in this country, in some federal states every second deceased lived in such a facility.

The outgoing Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) called the time around Christmas the “weakest moment in fighting the pandemic” because testing was done too late and too little in the facilities.

And yet the question now arises again: How well are the around 800,000 residents of the home protected shortly before the next Corona winter?

Some countries have come a long way with booster vaccinations

The short answer: Nobody knows exactly because important data is missing. For example, anyone who wants to find out how things are going with booster vaccinations in old people's and nursing homes, the so-called “boosters”, will encounter a surprising amount of ignorance. This also applies to a second important factor: the willingness of the nursing staff to vaccinate. There are also only estimates and information from individual institutions that indicate a wide range - it cannot be said more precisely at the moment.

From the point of view of Federal Health Minister Jens Spahn (CDU), however, not enough is apparently happening to protect the weakest, as can be seen from a draft resolution of his house for the health ministerial conference with the countries at the end of the week, which the FAZ has received. It states that the “booster vaccinations must be promoted and carried out promptly”, especially in old people's and nursing homes. In addition, stricter test concepts should apply to visitors and staff - regardless of the vaccination status.

But how are things going with the booster vaccinations in the homes, which are usually carried out by mobile vaccination teams and resident doctors?

In a survey by the FAZ among the ministries of health and social affairs, only individual federal states were able to provide specific information on this.

After all: some of these are already quite far.

In the most populous federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia, for example, almost 90 percent of the home residents are third-vaccinated, in Schleswig-Holstein it is also "almost all".

Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania states that 80 percent of the homes have been vaccinated, in Bremen there were mobile vaccination teams in 90 percent of the old people's and nursing homes.