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Berlin (dpa) - After the first cautious easing of the pandemic, the number of corona patients in Germany's intensive care units has risen again.
With more than 3000 occupied beds, the load is currently again as high as at the peak times in the first wave in spring 2020. This can be found in the register of the German Interdisciplinary Association for Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine (Divi).
“We are now starting the third wave in the intensive care units and at a very high level.
We had already warned about this at the end of February and that worries us very much, ”said Divi President Gernot Marx.
According to Divi data, 3056 Covid 19 patients were treated in German intensive care units on Sunday.
"We expect a rapid increase in the number of patients in the next few weeks, as the wave of intensive care patients always follows the wave of infections for two to three weeks," he added.
The numbers can therefore only be changed from mid-April.
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With incidences of around 200 infections in seven days per 100,000 inhabitants, emergency doctors are forecasting around 5,000 Covid-19 patients in intensive care units at the beginning of May.
That would be almost as many as at the height of the second wave at the beginning of January and could again put a heavy burden on many clinics.
The good news: If there is no new, more dangerous mutant and the vaccination continues well, the pandemic could be as good as over for the emergency wards of the clinics in August according to the current forecast.
Experts do not want to take the situation lightly.
"We can already see that in the intensive care units, that the patients are changing there: They are getting younger," said Lars Schaade, Vice President of the Robert Koch Institute.
Virologists have also repeatedly warned that vaccinating the oldest cohorts alone does not bring about relaxation.
Because even in the first wave, only about a quarter of intensive care patients were over 80 years old.
Many retirement home residents died in their facilities and were not even sent to intensive care units.
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The Robert Koch Institute counts 21.6 million people in Germany in the high-risk group for severe Covid-19 courses.
The institute considers the risk to be greatly increased for people over 65 years of age or with certain pre-existing conditions, such as diabetes, chronic kidney disease or the most severe form of obesity.
"With almost 6000 patients at the same time, Covid is by far the heaviest and strongest wave in intensive care medicine," said the scientific director of the Divi intensive care registry, Christian Karagiannidis.
The current number of over 3000 does not apply to the Divi as a magical limit from which the system automatically begins to overload.
Karagiannidis emphasized that this order of magnitude can be supplied.
"The more the number rises, the more other areas have to be restricted in order to still guarantee emergency care."
Increasing numbers also have consequences for the clinic teams.
"This is not a technical overstrain, it is physically and mentally," said Divi member Felix Walcher.
The exhaustion of the staff can be observed nationwide.
The sense of responsibility motivates.
"But that too is exhausted at some point."
Especially when the appreciation and support in clinics and society is not shown and lived enough.
"There is great concern that the chronic overload of the staff will lead to an exodus of employees from the care sector."
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The fact that the health system has not collapsed in recent months also has to do with lessons from the first wave and advances in avoiding serious disease courses.
In Germany, at the end of 2020, the proportion of hospital patients with Covid-19 in intensive care units halved compared to the first months of the pandemic: according to a study to 14 percent in December.
However, the chances of survival are no better than a year ago for the patients who are invasively ventilated: Around half of them die.
© dpa-infocom, dpa: 210322-99-916425 / 2