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Due to the strong increase in the burden on intensive care units in Germany in the corona pandemic, experts are sounding the alarm.
"Dear decision-makers, how high should the numbers rise before you want to react ???", wrote the scientific director of the Divi intensive care register, Christian Karagiannidis, on Twitter.
Cities like Bonn, Bremen and Cologne would hardly have free beds for the next heart attack, traffic accident or Covid 19 patients.
The Charité virologist Christian Drosten forwarded the intensive care doctor's text to his more than 700,000 followers on Thursday on Twitter with the comment “This is an emergency call”.
Since mid-March, the number of intensive care patients with Covid-19 has risen again nationwide.
At the moment there are more than 4,400, at the beginning of the year a high of 5762 was reached.
"If this continues, we will unfortunately soon have over 5000 Covid-19 patients," said former Divi President Uwe Janssens on Wednesday the RTL / ntv broadcasters.
From a number of 5000 to 6000 intensive care patients, it could be that some hospitals would have to switch back to emergency operation.
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The main bottleneck in supply is the availability of nursing staff.
A corona intensive care patient binds more doctors and nurses than others.
In previous pandemic waves, hospitals all over Germany had postponed planned interventions in order to secure the care of corona patients.
The Berlin University Hospital Charité announced on Thursday that it would reduce the number of planned interventions again from next week.
Divi leader Karagiannidis also called on the federal government to act again.
The increasing burden in the hospitals is no longer justifiable.
“The longer the situation lasts, the more employees will leave,” Karagiannidis told the “Spiegel”.
He supported the Federal Chancellor's plan to disempower the countries in the pandemic by means of an Infection Protection Act.
"If the situation is critical, we need central regulation."
Only a hard and consistent lockdown like in spring 2020 could bring the number of patients down, said the intensive care doctor.
Then you can keep the pandemic under control with a good testing and vaccination strategy and return to normal more quickly.
“The sooner we bring the numbers down, the higher the probability that we will be able to sit in the beer garden again in summer.
The German Interdisciplinary Association for Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine (Divi), which publishes the occupancy figures daily, has been warning for many weeks of the consequences of the high number of corona infections and recently called for a hard lockdown.