The lockdown effects of the past few weeks are finally being felt by the employees in many intensive care units.
The number of Covid patients is stabilizing.
Because the virus is so widespread in the population and because the new variants give rise to fears that it will accelerate its spread, patients and hospital staff must be better protected.
The intensive care doctor Stefan Kluge from the Hamburg University Hospital Eppendorf (UKE) explains how this can work.
And what bothers him about politics.
WORLD:
How is your ward today?
Stefan Kluge:
It is just as you can say for Germany as a whole: there has been a slight decline in the last few days.
We currently have 19 Covid-19 intensive care patients.
Nine of them are supplied with oxygen via the ECMO.
At the top we had 27 Covid-19 patients in the intensive care unit at the UKE.
WORLD:
Then we could actually stick to the current lockdown measures, right?
The hospitals are doing quite well ...