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

How is the situation?

Sebastian Eder

Editor in the Society department at FAZ.NET.

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This week we unfortunately had to temporarily expand our Covid area again, as more and more Covid patients are coming to us. We moved to a second ward with our suspected patients. As a result, we disrupted the health care of another department and were only able to withdraw to a ward by moving Covid patients to other hospitals. The hope that we can manage the entire Covid event in the fourth wave on one station has already turned out to be wishful thinking at a very early stage. Accordingly, I am a little disaffected. We obviously did not manage to convince so many people that we would be able to keep the rest of the hospital running without major disruptions. I am afraid,that the current situation is only a foretaste of what awaits us in autumn.

What kind of patients come to you?

Since the beginning of August we have cared for 99 patients in the normal ward, more than 80 percent of whom were not fully vaccinated. Of the fully vaccinated patients, three were with us because of Covid symptoms. They had a particularly high risk of a vaccination breakthrough due to previous immune-weakening diseases or old age. We also regularly have pregnant patients with us for whom there was no vaccination recommendation until recently. We also see Covid patients with vascular complications such as thrombosis, pulmonary embolism and strokes, whom we look after together with neurologists and angiologists. From my clinical point of view, there is no doubt that the vaccination has a very great benefit for the patients. Just as some trivialists like to portray the disease, it actually often runs in people who have been vaccinated:as an upper respiratory tract infection. The positive PCR test scares people, but I can calm these patients down quickly. The PCR result has a different meaning for vaccinated people, the risk of a severe course is much lower.

How dynamic is the development?

Due to the vaccination campaign, it is now more difficult to predict regionally how the burden will develop in the short term. The last time there were ten Covid patients with severe disease on one day and only one on the next day. The number of new admissions has fluctuated greatly in the past three weeks, and we didn't know exactly in which direction it was developing. This week we see a significant increase in new admissions and, as the coordinating house, we have to distribute the new patients to other houses. This differs from the previous waves, in which there was a relatively linear increase in hospitalizations. We also notice this in the surrounding hospitals: It can still be very quiet in one of the hospitals; a few kilometers further, many patients arrive. In Darmstadt we used to have a higher incidence,accordingly there are now more hospitalizations than in the district.

How old are the patients?