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Shortly before Christmas Eve, Germany is caught between hope and fear in the pandemic. While the newly approved Covid-19 vaccine from the Mainz company Biontech is about to be delivered and a new, apparently particularly contagious variant of the corona virus is spreading in England, intensive care doctors from Germany drew attention to the increasingly worrying situation in their clinics on Tuesday. .
Meanwhile, 5216 patients would have to be treated in intensive care, and this number will continue to grow, said Christian Karagiannidis during a press conference of the German Interdisciplinary Association for Intensive Care Medicine (Divi). Another 3,500 intensive care patients could be cared for, but the number of usable beds is constantly decreasing, also because there is an increasing shortage of staff. “It’s going to be very tight in the hospitals,” Karagiannidis said. In some regions, intensive care units are now so overloaded that patients have to be transferred to other federal states. By the end of last week, the Berlin clinics had already admitted about 51 patients from Brandenburg. And 30 patients were transferred from Saxony to Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.
In the coming days, the situation will get worse, Divi President Uwe Janssens said. Soon, the decision about which patients can live and which should die, the so-called triage, will no longer be elusive in individual cases. Doctors felt abandoned, so did Janssens. “Now it should also be the state’s job to protect doctors from this,” Janssens said. After all, it was about distributing life chances, but there were no corresponding legislative measures.
After all, the already difficult situation should not be exacerbated by the new Sars-CoV-2 variant, which is currently widespread in England. The mutated pathogen, which operates under the names B.1.1.7 or VUI-202012/01, appears to be significantly more contagious than the previously common variant and should have already reached Germany, said Berlin virologist Christian Drosten. But in view of the blockade, it is currently “quite difficult to gain a foothold in this country.” Drosten emphasized once again that, based on the current state of knowledge, B.1.1.7 does not appear to influence the severity of the disease. “This is very important for the population that is concerned now,” he said.
B.1.1.7 is also unlikely to have any influence on the efficacy of the vaccines, said Biontech co-founder and CEO Ugur Sahin. “At the moment we do not see any reason to adapt the vaccine,” he said during an online press conference. The vaccine would have persisted with other mutations. However, your company is checking whether a vaccine adaptation will be necessary. Expect the corresponding test results in two weeks.
This Wednesday, Biontech will begin to deliver its vaccine to the EU countries and, therefore, also to the German distribution centers. Despite the success, Sahin does not expect a quick return to “normalcy”. “We have to redefine normalcy,” he said: “The virus will stay with us for the next ten years. We have to get used to the fact that there will be infections and small outbreaks over and over again.” A normality in the sense that no stop is necessary, but thanks to vaccinations, it could be achieved from the end of summer. “We have to make sure that next winter is more or less normal,” says Sahin. This winter, as Sahin is hopeless, nothing will be normal.
