According to the President of the German Interdisciplinary Association for Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine (Divi), Gernot Marx, the situation in the intensive care units in German clinics is unusually tense for a summer. “We have to make sure again that we keep our ranks closed, which means we have to shift staff, we have to get staff out of the office, so after two weekends we also work the third weekend,” said Marx on Monday in the ZDF “Morgenmagazin”. “.
“Unfortunately, we have to postpone some operations that are not absolutely necessary so that we can take care of all our emergencies properly and safely.”
Marx had already pointed out at the weekend that more than half of the intensive care units (55 percent) were no longer operating as usual. Various factors are coming together, as he made clear on Monday. Currently, not only are twice as many Covid patients being treated in intensive care as at the same time last year, there are also almost 2,000 fewer intensive care beds available and many employees in the clinics are sick.
Surf tip: You can find all the news about the corona pandemic in the FOCUS Online news ticker
“I wouldn’t call it dramatic, but it’s very tense, and that’s unusual for this time of summer, when it’s usually always a bit quieter,” said Marx Winter The Divi President warned that it was really time to make healthcare professions attractive again.
Christian Karagiannidis, member of the Federal Government’s Corona Expert Council and one of the scientific directors of the Divi intensive care register, comes to the same assessment of the situation as Marx: It is very tense, but not dramatic, he told the “Süddeutsche Zeitung”. But he also said: “I have never seen so many staff losses due to Covid as in this wave.”
