The number of corona infections is rising again. If the intensive care cases also increase again, they will meet a decreasing number of beds ready for use. According to intensive care physician Karagiannidis, around half of all intensive care units report staff shortages. He fears that the situation will continue to deteriorate.
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.”
Around 580 of the 1,300 intensive care units nationwide reported significant staff shortages in mid-June, and there are now around 630, according to Karagiannidis. “In recent 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 worsen further as the number of infections continues to rise and the number of staff lost accordingly.
The Robert Koch Institute (RKI) recently gave the nationwide seven-day value of new infections per 100,000 inhabitants as a good 630 – a week earlier it was almost 450, in the previous month it was a good 280. However, the incidence does not provide a complete figure Picture of the infection situation: Experts assume that there are many unrecorded cases – mainly because many infected people no longer have a PCR test done, but only these tests count.
(This article was first published on Sunday, June 26, 2022.)
