The district administrator of Traunstein summed up the situation on Friday morning.

"We are completely full," says Siegfried Walch (CSU).

We are the intensive care units of the hospitals in the Upper Bavarian district.

Bavaria's Prime Minister Markus Söder and Health Minister Klaus Holetschek (both CSU) got an idea of ​​the situation in the areas in the southeast of the Free State that were particularly affected by the corona pandemic.

Kim Bjorn Becker

Editor in politics.

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Lorenz Hemicker

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“Completely full” doesn't quite hit it.

The local hospital reported that there were still vacancies in the intensive care unit that morning.

But according to the intensive register, the situation in the vicinity of the city of Traunstein does not look particularly good.

The district clinic in Trostberg is busy, as is a hospital in Prien am Chiemsee in the neighboring district of Rosenheim.

Bavaria and the eastern German states of Thuringia, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, Berlin and Brandenburg were the first regions in Germany that could no longer care for their Covid 19 intensive care patients themselves.

On Tuesday evening they activated the so-called cloverleaf system to move patients to other regions of the republic.

In this system, the federal states form a total of five regions, so-called clovers.

The east region is made up of five eastern German states

The southern region consists of Bavaria alone, the five eastern German states together form the eastern region.

In a first step, the countries concerned proposed 80 patients to be transferred.

54 sick people who can be transferred from a medical point of view were selected on Wednesday.

30 of them come from Bavaria, 14 from Saxony and ten from Thuringia.

The first seriously ill Covid 19 patients were relocated from Thuringia to Lower Saxony on Thursday evening.

The country is part of the "shamrock" north.

A rescue helicopter landed with a patient from Suhl at the Siloah Clinic in Hanover, the hospitals involved confirmed in the evening.

According to the German Press Agency, a second patient was driven to the clinic in a so-called intensive care vehicle.

According to the Suhl Clinic, both Covid 19 patients had to be artificially ventilated.

Saxony wanted to start moving patients on Friday.

According to Health Minister Petra Köpping (SPD), the Free State initially registered 16 patients for a transport.

The ministry later announced that 14 of these patients were eligible for transfer.

The country, which is particularly badly affected by the corona pandemic, wants to give up 20 patients every week.

Even Bavaria cannot avoid asking for help in other federal states.

The Bundeswehr plays an important role in the transport of Covid 19 intensive care patients.

An Airbus A310 of the Air Force landed at the airport in the Bavarian city of Memmingen on Friday afternoon to fly intensive care patients to North Rhine-Westphalia.

"Gigantic solidarity performance"

"The situation with us is such that we can help, and we do that," said the Prime Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, Hendrik Wüst (CDU), on Friday.

He pointed out that from now on, predictable operations would have to be postponed for many vaccinated people in the country.

"It is a gigantic solidarity effort that we are now asking these people to do," said Wüst.

The Bundeswehr's Airbus, which is equipped for medical evacuations ("MedEvac"), was already used in the pandemic, for example to fly German citizens out of the Chinese city of Wuhan and to bring Italian corona patients from the city of Bergamo to Germany for treatment. He has six intensive care beds, all of which should be occupied by seriously ill corona patients on Friday. According to the Air Force, it was also planned that around two dozen medics from the Bundeswehr fly to Münster-Osnabrück to take care of the patients.

In addition to the Airbus A310 MedEvac, the Air Force has two other aircraft ready for the clover-leaf flights. An Airbus A319OH was retrofitted at short notice especially for Corona use. Two intensive care beds were built into the aircraft, which is actually equipped for arms control missions. In an emergency, the Bundeswehr can also access an A400M MedEvac military transporter, which is stationed in Wunstorf, Lower Saxony. The aircraft would then no longer be available to fly wounded soldiers back to Germany from abroad. How many Corona flights the Air Force will face cannot yet be foreseen. From armed forces circles it is said that one reckons with at least a middle two-digit number.

In addition, the hospitals move numerous patients within the “clovers”.

Rhineland-Palatinate announced that it would accept four Covid 19 intensive care patients from Baden-Württemberg.

Both countries are part of the "clover leaf" southwest.

“We don't yet have any need to lay outside the cloverleaf,” says Ingolf Zellmann, the coordinator for the state of Brandenburg based in Cottbus.

It is still possible to care for patients within the country or the Eastern region.

But that is causing increasing problems.

"Brandenburg is always a week or two behind Saxony," says Zellmann.