When Marion Verg used to enter a clinic with her clipboard, she was often followed by dozens of seriously injured people.

Verg works at the Frankfurt Health Department and is in charge of medical security there.

She organizes unannounced emergency drills for the city's hospitals.

The fifty-seven-year-old ensures that the hospital emergency plans, which the hospitals are legally obliged to draw up, are subjected to a stress test.

To do this, she needs many liters of fake blood and volunteers who often pretend to be Oscar winners as injured people.

Evaluating the results should help the clinics to prepare for real situations.

Marie Lisa Kehler

Deputy head of the regional section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

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At least that was the case before the outbreak of the pandemic.

For more than two years, Verg hasn't asked for volunteers to have wounds painted for the exercise.

She is still in contact with the clinics.

Because the special situations that were only simulated for a few hours in the exercises have become part of everyday life in many places in recent years.

Forgets that she won't be able to play out hypothetical catastrophes in the next few months either.

After two years of Corona, the staff situation in the clinics does not allow for such an additional burden.

“We have to stay in reality.

We are still in the pandemic situation. ”It seems as if she sometimes has to remind herself through sentences like this.

She can rarely afford to look back these days

The day seems far away when she and a colleague used only a pencil and a ruler to draw the possible routes of the vaccination route on a map of the trade fair.

An eternity seems to have passed since the first visitors under the dome of the Festhalle received their vaccination.

As if it were decades ago that the vaccination center, designed for 4,000 visitors, was slowed down "in full operation" because all appointments with the vaccine manufacturer Astra-Zeneca suddenly had to be canceled.

All of these memories are actually still fresh.

None older than two years.

Verg can rarely afford to look back these days.

She is already busy drawing up contingency plans for possible crisis scenarios in the future.

She mentally erased the pencil plan for the vaccination center months ago.

A new, no less complicated one was drawn over it, which regulates the accommodation of fled Ukrainians in the festival hall.

Verg, like numerous other stakeholders in the city, was also involved in this with the "Medical Emergency Response" department.

"What's the worst that could happen, and how can it be prevented?" These questions drive Verg.

In her mind she has already turned to a new project.

It goes from one crisis to the next.

No breathing.

The city must prepare for the possible impact of the energy crisis.

The "Medical Emergency Response" department, which received more staff during the corona pandemic, is also involved in the complex process, which brings together many specialist groups.