Triage hospitals: how bad is the situation in Germany?

First hospitals with triage: how bad is the situation in Germany?

A clinic in Zittau can no longer treat all corona patients equally well, says the clinic director. Meanwhile, the figures in Switzerland are much worse than in Germany.

Christoph Reichmuth from Berlin / ch media

The Upper Lusatian Bergland Clinic in the small Saxon town of Zittau has exceeded its capacity due to Corona. At least that’s what the clinic’s director, Mathias Mengel, stated in an online citizen forum Tuesday night:

The doctor is said to have said that in dramatic terms, German media reported.

It is also not always possible to transfer crown patients to other intensive care clinics. “We are in the epicenter, some houses no longer accept.” It has already happened that there was no longer any adequate help for the patients.

Who is ventilated and who is not?

The clinic director’s call for help made headlines. Has the situation in Germany really gotten so out of control that certain clinics have to classify corona patients? So that doctors in the winter 2020 crown have to decide who will receive vital help from official devices and who will not.

One thing is clear: there was only a half denial of the East Saxon hospital control center early Tuesday afternoon – it is true that due to the tense crown situation and depleted reception capacity at regional clinics in the Bautzen and Görlitz districts, patients were recently “augmented” to more distant hospitals in Dresden or Leipzig had to be relocated, it was said.

These are still isolated cases, but an increase in these cases is to be expected. The control center did not confirm that needy patients could not receive civil services.

There are hardly any free hospital beds in Berlin

The Görlitz district, in which the clinic is located, is one of the crown hot spots in Germany. The East Saxony region near the border with the Czech Republic and Poland has a seven-day incidence of more than 600. This means that more than 600 people per 100,000 inhabitants are infected with the coronavirus in seven days. In Switzerland, this value is currently just under 4,500.

Statistics from the German Interdisciplinary Association for Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine show that the situation in some federal states is tense. In Saxon Switzerland, almost 90 percent of the 180 intensive care beds are occupied by patients with crown, only 10 beds are free in the region east of Dresden. Even in the capital Berlin, only 9 percent of intensive care beds are unoccupied. (bzbasel.ch)