The RKI reports more than 100,000 new infections in Germany almost every day. The infection pressure in the general population thus remains high. Corona outbreaks are also increasing in retirement and nursing homes.
The number of corona outbreaks in old people’s and nursing homes has recently increased significantly again. Outbreaks with at least one new case were reported to the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) in the past week from 235 of these institutions, as the weekly report shows. In the previous week there were 192. The over 80-year-olds are still most affected by severe illnesses. In this age group, around 25 per 100,000 inhabitants came to the hospital last week with a severe respiratory infection and Covid-19. Across all age groups, this value was 3.7 – that corresponds to around 3100 new hospital admissions per week.
According to the RKI, the infection pressure in the general population and the associated burden on the health system remained high. “Even if the number of cases remains the same, further increases in serious illnesses, hospitalizations and deaths can be expected,” writes the institute.
For the past calendar week, the authority calculated a number of 800,000 to 1.3 million Sars-CoV-2 infected people with symptoms of an acute respiratory disease. The number of doctor visits due to acute respiratory diseases is still significantly higher than usual for the time of year. 1.2 million consultations were recorded for the past week, a good quarter of them due to a Sars-CoV-2 infection. The RKI still advises avoiding contacts if symptoms of a respiratory disease occur, such as a runny nose, sore throat or cough, regardless of vaccination status and rapid test results.
The nationwide seven-day incidence was given by the RKI on Thursday morning at 720.4. 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 not all infected people have a PCR test done. Only positive PCR tests count in the statistics. In addition, late registrations and transmission problems can lead to the distortion of individual daily values. The health authorities in Germany recently reported 152,149 new corona infections (previous week: 135,402) and 145 deaths (previous week: 108) 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 and transmission problems.
