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The reality is disturbing and painful: more than one in two corona deaths in Berlin were previously infected in a nursing home. That’s 492 of 899 deceased. A total of 3,425 people have been infected in Berlin nursing homes since the start of the pandemic. A month ago it was 1021. Behind every number there is a destiny, a human life. And these are cases that were avoidable.
No one is responsible for the pandemic, but they are responsible for the high number of deaths in nursing homes. It has been known for months that older people are at special risk. For months, doctors and virologists have been warning that homes and their residents need special protection. Today, the seven-day incidence among people over 90 in Berlin is almost incredible 834.3. How could that happen?
Now is not the time to ask the question of blame, Mitte’s health adviser said after a corona outbreak emerged in a home with at least 23 deaths in his district this week. Other city councils for health prefer to stop informing the public. They fear biased reports that the facility is being ridiculed and the staff is even more demoralized.
That must sound like a joke to family members. While hospitals have been partially protected, nursing homes have been moved to the center of death by and with the virus. Mothers, fathers, grandmothers, grandfathers, and in-laws all died shortly before Christmas. Usually in a few days, almost always without saying goodbye. Just go away. Even funerals can only be attended by the closest family members. And that will not change for the moment, the death rate in Berlin’s nursing homes is 15 percent of those infected and the trend is increasing. If you get infected now, you may no longer experience Christmas.
There are those responsible for these deaths. Doctors speak confidently of home managers who allow their employees to work without a mask. The home managers confess that they were unable to isolate the infected people from the double rooms, due to lack of space. Nurses report that they have been instructed to report to work ill and that protective equipment is missing. Berlin Health Senator Dilek Kalayci (SPD) talks about temporary workers who stop working when the first crown is found, and about mobile test teams “playing with their thumbs” because no one asks for their help.
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But it would be a mistake to blame the nursing staff in general. If some home management has failed now, it is because they are trapped in a health system that has been ill for a long time. In which the focus is not on health and the best possible care, but on optimizing staff and benefits.
Employees of Berlin nursing homes pay a high price: 1,619 of them were infected at work. For months they have been in the front row at the Corona front. Underpaid, poorly trained, barely appreciated. The applause of spring has long since subsided, leaving exhaustion and no prospect of improvement.
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Rather, it is a failure of politics. There they learned about the development of numbers and did nothing for a long time. Still waiting for the Christmas miracle, while the emergency broke out in more and more homes. The public was only informed on demand and then only tenaciously.
Now, too late, the Senate is reacting and tightening the rules. Staff must be tested every other day. Residents can only receive one guest per day for one hour. Visitors must submit a negative test result. For the nearly 300 care centers in the city, in which there are now corona buds, these rules come too late. Death will continue.
