Many experts are already warning of the autumn wave. Everyone agrees that it will come. How high it will be is uncertain. Modeler Dirk Paessler tries to find an answer. Right now there are calculations with many unknowns. Which points are important here.
During the pandemic, Dirk Paessler has become one of her modelers. His calculations draw possible scenarios – like now for the fall in terms of incidence, intensive care bed occupancy, deaths and hospitalizations. The latter made it necessary to update his model calculation.
On Twitter, the entrepreneur presents what awaits us in autumn – in the optimistic, central and pessimistic scenario.
Those are the core statements. Because the height of the wave in autumn can hardly be reliably predicted. This is not possible with the current data situation. Even the incidence is currently very imprecise due to the high number of unreported cases. Only people with a positive PCR test are counted as corona infected in the statistics of the Robert Koch Institute (RKI). At the same time, the rapid tests have been chargeable for many for some time, so experts assume that even more infections will remain undetected. This means that all values derived from the incidence are just as uncertain. One thing is clear for Paessler: “A wave seems unavoidable to me at the moment.”
Regarding his curves, Paessler points out: “The model calculation only contains modeling for voluntary changes in behavior” – in the case of the optimistic scenario, citizens reduce their contacts when the incidence increases. But the calculation did not take into account any predetermined “measures”. To do this, the political will would first have to be found and, in some cases, the legal requirements would have to be created, the modeler notes. !function(){var t=window.addEventListener?”addEventListener”:”attachEvent”;(0,window[t])(“attachEvent”==t?”onmessage”:”message”,function(t){if (“string”==typeof t.data
Paessler writes: “The calculation of hospitalizations now explicitly takes into account the approximately 50 percent higher pathogenicity of BA.5.” on the number of new patients.
It has not yet been proven that the currently dominant omicron variant is actually more pathogenic, i.e. causes more severe disease than its predecessors BA.1 and BA.2. There are indications of that. When asked by FOCUS online, virologist Friedemann Weber assessed BA.4 and BA.5 as “possibly also pathogenic”, lung specialist Cihan Çelik from the Darmstadt Clinic reported similar impressions from his everyday life. Virologist Ulf Dittmer from the University Hospital Essen saw things differently: “So far I have not seen any convincing data that BA.4/5 are more pathogenic than BA.1/2 were.” There is no evidence of this in Essen either.
The figures from the intensive care register of the German Interdisciplinary Association for Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine (DIVI) and the German Hospital Society (DKG) show that things are getting tight in many clinics – even if the differences between the regions are large. Since the beginning of June, more and more Covid 19 patients have been in normal and intensive care units.
However, it is currently not clear that this is due to the higher pathogenicity of BA.5. Other factors also come into play: BA.5 is definitely more contagious than the previous corona variants, so many people become infected. At the same time, those who are vaccinated or recovered also fall ill (again) because BA.5 can escape the immune system. In addition, the immune defense against Sars-CoV-2 is currently not so good, especially among the risk groups, because, for example, the protection decreases faster with age and the vaccinations are longer ago.
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So Paessler’s calculations contain many unknowns, which he himself admits. Nevertheless, they make it clear: the autumn wave will come and there is still time to take precautions. The figures in the RKI weekly report show, for example: Outbreaks in old people’s and nursing homes are increasing. Concepts are needed to protect risk groups. The school holidays will soon come to an end in the first federal states. But even in the third year of the pandemic, politicians did not manage to prepare the schools for the expected increase in the number of infections in autumn, complained Udo Beckmann, chairman of the Education and Training Association in an interview with the editorial network Germany (RND): “Schools are still no safe places to learn and run the risk of having to be closed again in the coming school year if the number of infections rises again.”
The virologist Isabelle Eckerle also criticized the missed opportunities such as more lessons and outdoor initiatives. In Scandinavian countries, this is much more common in any weather, the expert wrote on Twitter and has a suggestion for everyone: “If we were to reduce the time spent in musty, poorly ventilated indoor spaces with artificial light (not only for children, but also for adults) would have that many positive effects (infections, mental health, weight).”
