Doctor Çelik, we talk regularly about your work as a senior physician in the isolation ward for Covid-19 patients at the Darmstadt Clinic.

What is the current situation?

Julia Anton

Editor in the Society department at FAZ.NET

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    A summer with only a few Covid cases is just beginning in our clinic.

    We currently only have one patient left in the monitoring and normal ward, who will hopefully be discharged in the coming days.

    There are still three long-term ventilators in the intensive care unit who have been requiring mechanical ventilation for weeks.

    It is of course much more difficult to wean patients off ventilation and to discharge them again.

    We know from the previous waves that the occupancy numbers in the normal and monitoring wards decrease more quickly, while they level off on a plateau in the intensive care unit - albeit at a low level, so that we have sufficient capacity for other serious illnesses again.

    What happens when the last patient for the time being is discharged?

    The same topic has been preoccupying us not only since the beginning of the pandemic: staff. A spatially available ward is of little use if there is no staff to care for patients. Nursing staff is currently being withdrawn from the Covid ward in favor of other wards, and for two weeks we have only been working with a core team that cares for the few suspected and confirmed Covid patients. The staff is urgently needed on the other internal medicine wards because we have put a lot of things off there in the past few months. However, our nursing team is decimated after a year of pandemic. Due to the stress, many colleagues from nursing have decided to go part-time or even to turn their backs on the job entirely.As is so often the case, an already existing trend has intensified as a result of the pandemic. Accordingly, we have to think about how we can build a stable team.

    In your opinion, what is necessary for this?

    This is of course difficult from a medical point of view, because you are always a little bit on the outside.

    As I perceive it from conversations, it naturally starts with the working conditions, the pay, the ability to plan, and the compatibility of family and work.

    But there are representatives of the nursing professions and specialist societies who can do justice to this complex topic.

    In Great Britain, planned easing has just been postponed because the delta variant is becoming increasingly widespread there.

    Do you worry?

    For us, looking at Great Britain is to some extent a glimpse into our near future. We are sure that the Delta variant will replace the previous variants. It is already 90 percent in the UK and 10 percent in the US. The decisive factor, however, is not the extent to which Delta proportionally prevails, but whether the variant will also lead to an increase in the number of infections overall. According to the findings from Great Britain, we know that we are now in a race against time: We only have adequate protection after two vaccinations, the first vaccination is not enough. The current low incidences are buying us time. The Delta variant already exists in Germany, but it is at a low level. We also assume that this variant has a higher seasonality effect.We must now make good use of this additional time to move forward with the vaccination campaign so that we have sufficient immunity in the population in the autumn.

    What other findings do you have about the delta variant?

    On the one hand, the symptoms seem to be different: there is less loss of smell and taste, but more headaches and actually a runny nose. On the other hand, we now know that the delta variant is even more contagious than the alpha variant, the first reports more often lead to a more severe course and the hospitalization rate is higher. In addition, younger patients are more likely to be affected. So we have to be vigilant now and ensure through regular sequencing that we will notice early on when the variant is spreading. To do this, the existing test criteria must be maintained and tests must be performed on a symptom-related basis if someone has already received the first vaccination. That secures the current easing and our summer.