The intensive care doctor Christian Karagiannidis from the Corona Expert Council of the Federal Government warns of massive staff shortages in the clinics in view of the increasing number of infections. “The staff situation in the intensive care units is extremely tense,” said the scientific director of the intensive care bed register of the DIVI specialist association to the newspapers of the Funke media group. “The system is closer to a tipping point than I previously thought.”
Of the 1,300 intensive care units nationwide, around 580 reported significant staff shortages in mid-June, and there are now around 630. “In the past few years, we have never had as few operable high-care beds as we currently have,” he said. Until recently, the average across Germany was around 8,000, now it is still 7,500. It is to be expected that the situation will deteriorate further due to the increasing number of infections and correspondingly more staff shortages.
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Karagiannidis is one of the two scientific directors of the Divi intensive care register, which records the treatment capacities in intensive care medicine in acute hospitals in Germany on a daily basis.
The Robert Koch Institute (RKI) had given the nationwide seven-day incidence on Saturday morning at 632.9. This is evident from numbers that reflect the status of the RKI dashboard at 5 a.m. The day before, the value of new infections per 100,000 inhabitants and week was 618.2 (previous week: 445.1; previous month: 281.8).
However, the incidence does not provide a complete picture of the infection situation. Experts have been assuming for some time that there will be a large number of cases not recorded by the RKI – mainly because by far not all infected people have a PCR test done. Only positive PCR tests count in the statistics. In addition, late registrations or transmission problems can lead to a distortion of individual daily values.
The health authorities in Germany recently reported 89,336 new corona infections (previous week: 80,264) and 84 deaths (previous week: 58) to the RKI within one day. Here, too, comparisons of the data are only possible to a limited extent due to the test behavior, late registrations or transmission problems.
