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There was a big concern before Christmas and New Year’s Eve: Could the holidays bring significantly more crown patients to intensive care units? Now it is clear: the fears have not come true.
Before Christmas and the turn of the year, the fears were great: would family gatherings and celebrations cause the number of corona cases and with them the use of intensive care units to skyrocket? While the federal and state governments had promised to relax crown measures for the holiday season in November, these promises were gradually revised in December – the infection process seemed too uncontrollable.
Now it is clear: the worst fears have not come true. A sharp increase in Covid-19 illnesses after Christmas and New Year’s Eve did not materialize, possibly thanks to contact restrictions. “We cannot see a Christmas or New Year peak,” said Gernot Marx, president of the German Interdisciplinary Association for Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine. He thanked the citizens for their “great discipline.”
“Probably the quietest New Year’s Eve in decades”
The president of the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), Lothar Wieler, also praised the behavior of the population around Christmas and New Year. The vast majority behaved responsibly and followed the measures. People weren’t traveling as much as usual, Wieler said at a joint press conference with Federal Health Minister Jens Spahn. This can now be seen in the decline in the number of new corona infections and intensive cases. Spahn added: “It was probably the quietest New Year’s Eve Germany has seen in decades.”
Right now, around 4,800 Covid-19 patients are in intensive care treatment, Marx said. At the beginning of January there were almost 5,800. “From my point of view, that was the most critical situation since there has been intensive medical treatment in Germany.” Intensive care medicine is now feeling the first positive effects of the blockade, according to Marx. But one is still very far from a situation that can be described as relaxation.
Hospital treatment only after several weeks.
Typically, several weeks elapse between coronavirus infection and possible hospital admission. The director of the German Hospital Society, Gerald Gass, considers a period of three weeks normal. This means that the effects of the infection process in hospital care can always only be determined with a time delay.
Patients who were infected at Christmas should not have come to the hospital until mid-January if the illness was severe. There, in turn, therapy in the case of Covid-19 takes a long time. According to intensive care physician Marx, it will take “several weeks” to three months before corona patients currently being treated can leave intensive care units.
Excess mortality in the week of Christmas to 31 percent
Even a possible death related to the coronavirus, it usually takes several weeks or months since infection. Therefore, the data on the so-called excess mortality also only allow to draw conclusions about the onset of infection and the efficacy of delayed countermeasures. The excess mortality indicates how much greater the number of deaths is in a given period compared to the average of the previous years.
As reported by the Federal Statistical Office, almost a third more people died in Germany during Christmas week. According to preliminary results, there were at least 24,470 deaths in the 52nd calendar week (December 21-27, 2020). That’s 31 percent or 5,832 cases more than the average for the years 2016 to 2019. These numbers are not adequate for evaluating wreath measurements at Christmas, but instead provide information on the infection process in early December.
