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Karlsbad (dpa) - More and more people in the Czech Republic are calling on their government to ask Germany for help in treating corona intensive care patients.
More than 2,700 people had already signed an online petition with the title “Open the borders for ambulances” by Monday.
The President of the Karlovy Vary Region in the west of the country, Petr Kulhanek, expressed his frustration.
He appealed to the cabinet in Prague to negotiate the possibility of relocation to Saxony or Bavaria.
“And nothing,” wrote the conservative politician on Twitter.
In the administrative region around Karlsbad (Karlovy Vary) not a single intensive care bed was free for corona patients.
In the neighboring region of Pilsen (Plzen) there was still a single free intensive care bed.
The situation in the city hospital of Eger (Cheb) is developing particularly dramatically.
Every day, patients are transferred from there by ambulance or army helicopters to clinics far away within the Czech Republic - sometimes over hundreds of kilometers.
The border town is surrounded on three sides by Germany.
Health Minister Jan Blatny believes that foreign aid is not necessary as long as capacity is available in other parts of the country.
Critics note that the northwest of the country has been medically undersupplied for years.
There is not a single university hospital in the Karlovy Vary region.
The authorities reported 2540 new corona cases nationwide within 24 hours on Monday.
There have been more than 987,000 detected infections and 16,392 deaths since the pandemic began.
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© dpa-infocom, dpa: 210201-99-256855 / 2
Tweet Kulhaneks, in Czech
Petition, in Czech