Shortly before nine o'clock the queue of people curled their way from the anteroom down the stairs into the foyer and out into the courtyard, once around the house across the square to the street. The district of Saxon Switzerland has announced that “vaccinating without an appointment with the mobile vaccination team”, and around 300 people here hope to get a corona vaccination on Thursday morning. “I've been here at seven,” says an older woman who got hold of one of the few chairs in the waiting room. The man next to her reports that his family doctor is on vacation and that this is his third attempt to get the vaccination. He has already been sent away to other places twice "because the vaccine has run out". Several waiting people share the experience when suddenly movement occurs in the queue. An employee of the Red Cross, which coordinates the mobile vaccination teams in Saxony,hurries up the stairs in his blue surgical gown, unlocks the vaccination room, distributes information sheets. She stepped in as a replacement at short notice, she says. Now you have to see.

Timo Frasch

Political correspondent in Munich.

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Stefan Locke

Correspondent for Saxony and Thuringia based in Dresden.

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It is already clear in the morning: It will only be enough for a maximum of half the people, and that is not due to the vaccine, says Kai Kranich from the DRK. "Our teams only take as much with them as they can inoculate with the existing staff in one day." Around 100 vaccinations are the norm, now 150 can be achieved. Saxony's DRK has had two teams in each district since the end of September the vaccination centers were closed due to a lack of demand. In October there was hardly any need for vaccinations, says Kranich. Since the beginning of November, however, people have been running into their booth. Not so much the unvaccinated, but above all people who wanted to receive their third vaccination, the “booster”. Since then, the DRK statistics have shown more than two thirds of booster vaccinations and just one sixth of first vaccinations.In Heidenau, too, almost everyone in the waiting room raised their hands when asked about the booster.

The district of Saxon Switzerland-Eastern Ore Mountains has 245,000 inhabitants, around half of whom are vaccinated, ten percent less than the already low Saxony average and 20 percent less than the German average. "Many people have the attitude: It doesn't affect me," says a mother who is waiting with her twelve-year-old son in Heidenau for his second vaccination. He is an exception in his class. In the waiting room, which feels full of vaccination advocates, this meets with the greatest lack of understanding. Because the virus is spreading violently in the area, for weeks the district has been one of the ten regions of Germany most severely affected by the pandemic, and with around 1,400 new infections per 100,000 inhabitants in seven days it even took the top spot at times. The hospitals are full and the unvaccinated are mostly affected.They occupy 90 percent of the Corona places in the intensive care units. There are also vaccinated patients in normal wards, says Steffen Schön, medical director of the hospital in the district town of Pirna. "But we have a group of unvaccinated people who consistently have the worse course."

In Bavaria, which is also badly affected, the Traunstein district is one of those with the highest incidences.

Last 1117. Traunstein is located in southern Upper Bavaria.

The highest point is the Sonntagshorn, almost 2000 meters, the rate of second vaccinations is 56 percent.

So the district has exactly the profile that Prime Minister Markus Söder recently identified as being jointly responsible for high corona incidences: very southern, very close to the mountains, very skeptical of vaccinations.

The young district administrator Siegfried Walch, born in 1984 in nearby Bad Reichenhall, says he has “no sociological knowledge”, but he does give possible reasons for the high numbers.

Tourism.

Or the neighborhood to Austria, which is even more severely affected.