It doesn't take long before Alten Blaskowitz and Christian Brandmann's Paloma Palm know why the elderly woman lying in front of them on the floor of their Nuremberg apartment screams in pain.

Your right leg is turned outwards, looking a little shorter than the other - a clear sign of a broken femur.

When trying to catch a saucer, it fell, says the gray-haired lady, pointing to the broken pieces under the wooden table.

Fortunately right next to the phone with which she could call the emergency services.

Franca Wittenbrink

Editor in politics.

  • Follow I follow

The two paramedics are relieved.

For surgical emergencies like these, it is still relatively easy to find a bed in a Nuremberg hospital at the moment.

If the lady had suffered a heart attack, it would have been difficult, because intensive care beds have been in short supply since the fourth wave of corona.

In Bavaria, almost 90 percent of them are currently occupied, every third of them with a corona patient.

More and more often, entire emergency rooms are signing off because they can no longer admit patients.

Then the Nuremberg paramedics of the Johanniter have to drive to other cities, Dinkelsbühl or Ansbach for example;

if things go bad, they drive until shortly before Munich.

This can take several hours.

For some patients, every minute counts.

"A ticking time bomb"

“Have you been vaccinated against Corona?” Palm von Alten Blaskowitz asks the 84-year-old patient who keeps coughing with a contorted face.

She says no.

The paramedic thinks about putting on a mask for a moment, but then decides against it.

The pain reliever the woman is given reduces her breathing; mouth and nose protection would only intensify this.

"I would really recommend a vaccination," says Palm von Alten Blaskowitz in a friendly voice.

"We see people your age every day who we have to bring to the intensive care unit."

After the patient was brought from her apartment to the ambulance using a turntable ladder with the help of the fire brigade and finally brought to the emergency room, Palm von Alten Blaskowitz bursts out.

“I just don't understand why so many people don't get vaccinated,” she says.

"With the current incidences, it's only a matter of time before you become infected."

The 29-year-old paramedic speaks of a "ticking time bomb".

She still feels that she can take good care of her patients - even if it is becoming more and more difficult to take them directly to the nearest clinic.

She prefers not to imagine where this could develop in the coming weeks.

In any case, the system is already at its limit.

Many of her colleagues see it similarly.

The Bavarian aid organizations have just made an urgent appeal to politicians and the Bavarian population because of the increasingly dramatic corona situation.

The rescue service is overburdened, the staff are physically and mentally at their limit.

The transport of infected people with the rescue service has increased fourfold in the past four months, according to Theo Zellner, President of the Bavarian Red Cross (BRK).

Above all, he lacks the solidarity of the unvaccinated towards the rescue and care workers.

It is "no longer a private matter not to be vaccinated".