"We are under no illusions," says Cihan Çelik, senior physician and head of a ward for Covid patients at the Darmstadt Clinic.

“The worst is not over yet.” The Hessian Health Minister Kai Klose (The Greens) also warns against underestimating the fourth wave.

“September is nice and you can be outside.

But if there is more going on inside, the risk of infection will also increase, ”he said in a press conference on Friday.

Given a vaccination rate of only around 63 percent, doctors and politicians are particularly concerned about the risk of major outbreaks among unvaccinated people.

Ewald Hetrodt

Correspondent for the Rhein-Main-Zeitung in Wiesbaden.

  • Follow I follow

Çelik described the current situation in the hospitals as a “foretaste of autumn”, who has repeatedly provided the FAZ with information about the situation on his ward in interviews over the past few months. On Thursday, according to the Ministry of Health, 147 patients infected with the virus were treated in the intensive care units of the six Hessian specialty hospitals. They are around 50 years old on average. Around 80 percent of them are not vaccinated.

The fully immunized patients are mostly elderly and other debilitated people. In these cases, however, the disease usually does not take a severe symptomatic course, emphasizes Çelik. "It is clear: the vaccination has a very good protective effect." The difficulties with the unvaccinated are all the greater. “They very often show remorse,” reports the doctor. Few of them have such a closed worldview that they reject protection from infection per se. Many are just simply disorganized. For others, the slightest effort was an obstacle to preventing them from getting vaccinated. "They grieve when they are with us in the clinic." The situation in Darmstadt and in many other Hessian houses is already tense. The challenge isTo ensure both normal operation and the supply of Covid patients in parallel, says Çelik. "I am no longer so optimistic that we will achieve this goal." Even today, more and more patients have to be relocated to other hospitals because the capacities are insufficient .

Relocated quickly if necessary

In the worst case, it could happen that planned operations would have to be postponed because the capacity would be needed for Covid patients who would not have been vaccinated, said Klose.

According to him, the situation in southern Hesse is a little more tense than in the north.

However, the load situation in the individual supply areas has always been different.

That is why the ministry developed a special set of instruments in the course of the pandemic. The situation in each individual hospital is recorded on a daily basis. With a weekly decree, the burden will be evenly distributed among all hospitals. The entire intensive care medicine is networked with a Tele-Covid app. Finally, a coordination office for secondary transport ensures that patients are relocated more quickly if necessary and that individual regions are relieved.

According to Klose, the federal government decided that the hospitalization rate was the new leading indicator for assessing the pandemic situation.

But he himself had enforced that the occupancy of the intensive care beds in Hesse had the same weight.

"We look very closely at how the overall burden on the hospitals is developing, but we also continue to consult the incidence of infections as an early warning system." If the limit values ​​defined in the ordinance were exceeded, the state government would have to tighten the requirements again.

This can be prevented by vaccinations.