The third pandemic winter is approaching, and slowly, one hopes, things should be going better, more routinely than in previous years.

Citizens and institutions should be fit enough for the pandemic that life with the virus is possible even in winter without too many restrictions.

But looking at the hospitals gives you a queasy feeling.

Chaos reigned there in many places in the first Corona winters: Anyone who wanted to know how many beds in the normal wards and how many in the intensive care units were occupied by Covid patients reached their limits.

The occupancy fluctuated from day to day, there was not an up-to-date reporting system for all areas of the clinic - in some cases data was transmitted with a long delay, keyword: fax machine.

And the,

For example, almost exactly a year ago, the Infection Protection Act was changed so that the hospitalization rate replaced the incidence as a measure for the pandemic strategy: From then on, how crowded the Covid wards were, determined how much the general public had to restrict themselves.

If it was full "on intensive care", districts could impose curfews, remind people to work from home, and tighten the mask requirement.

The situation in the clinics will also determine our degrees of freedom this winter.

It is all the more irritating that, according to the German Hospital Society, only 350 out of 1900 clinics are connected to DEMIS, the "German Electronic Reporting and Information System for Infection Protection".

According to the intention of the legislator, this should not have happened until January 1, 2023.

Since the concern about the autumn wave is not only great for Health Minister Karl Lauterbach, the deadline for the introduction was brought forward to September 17, 2022.

From then on, every clinic should report the number of Covid patients to the health authorities and the Robert Koch Institute "up to date" and "immediately" via DEMIS.

Nothing will come of it.

Because many hospitals continue to transmit the data of patients who have tested positive by hand, this is not yet possible automatically.

It remains to be hoped that the virus will lose its desire to mutate and remain relatively harmless for well-immunized people.

Nobody needs another Corona winter in which people guess rather than know.