People who are not yet 50 years old, are seriously ill with Covid-19 and need artificial ventilation. Hardly any vacant intensive care beds and staff who have been working at the limit of overload for weeks: doctors in Bavaria’s intensive care units are sounding the alarm.
The situation in Klinikum Großhadern is dramatic
The situation is also dramatic at Munich’s largest hospital in Großhadern. Sonja May is a nurse in the Corona intensive care unit in Großhadern. She is currently taking blood from a patient who has been connected to the so-called ECMO for a long time. This is a machine that enriches the blood with oxygen. Because the patient’s lungs are no longer able to do this.
The patient’s lung muscles have receded as a result of the ventilator, May explains. Now the man has to recover from the life-saving treatment. “His respiratory muscles are currently very weak and it can happen that the muscles become exhausted. We have to monitor this with the blood samples.”
In my mid-forties on the ventilator
One corridor down the road, senior physician Sandra Frank takes care of a new patient. The patient is in her mid-forties and contracted the British mutant. Now she had to go to the lung machine. Four doctors have just turned the woman back from prone to supine position.
“She has a very severe form of Covid-19, her lungs fail and that’s why she gets the maximum therapy that we can offer at a university hospital,” explains anesthetist and intensive care doctor Frank. “Now we have to hope that the therapy will work for her too.”
Difference to the first two waves
In intensive care unit 3 in Munich-Großhadern, the number of patients who have a severe course of Covid-19 is increasing. 14 of 16 beds are currently occupied, says the director of anesthesia and intensive care, Professor Bernhard Zwißler.
And: Those affected are getting younger and younger: “The problem is that we are increasingly seeing patients who are no longer well over 60 as in the first two waves, but are 50 or sometimes 40 years old and are seriously ill “, said Zwißler.
Situation is “really dramatic”
According to Zwißler, the situation is now “really dramatic”. Every day, his employees would have to prioritize which patients they can still admit to the intensive care units. “And which patients, whose treatment is also important, we simply have to postpone.”
As Secretary General of the German Society for Anesthesiology and Intensive Care Medicine, Zwißler also takes politicians to the task: “We are definitely moving towards a limit and the employees would not understand why, for example, politicians lay their hands on their laps and watch developments inactive when practically every bed here is occupied. “
Intensive care beds are becoming scarce across Bavaria
Similar to Großhadern, intensive care beds are becoming scarce elsewhere in Bavaria: 90 percent of all available intensive care beds are currently occupied – not only with corona patients, but mostly.
There are no free beds in the Landshut and Regensburg districts, for example. The districts of Cham, Schwandorf and Kelheim and several other municipalities reported only one or two free intensive care beds.
Holetschek: situation “still manageable”
In the past three weeks, the occupancy of the so-called ICU beds has risen by around 43 percent, said Bavaria’s Minister of Health Klaus Holetschek (CSU). The situation is “still manageable”, but gives cause for concern in view of the increasing number of infections.
ICU beds are intensive care beds with invasive ventilation options. Treatment in such a bed does not necessarily mean that the patient is ventilated. However, ventilation may be required immediately at any time.
Zwißler: Load limit will soon be reached
The approximately 70 employees in intensive care unit 3 in Großhadern do their best so that nobody has to be turned away. In the worst case, they could still activate an emergency reserve. But if nothing changes, they will soon reach their limits, says the intensive care doctor Zwißler.
After days, sometimes weeks of intensive care, to experience how the patients die anyway is a burden that the nurses and doctors also have to cope with.
Patient writes: “Great team”
Back with intensive care nurse Sonja May and her patient. He is currently being ventilated through an incision in the trachea and can therefore not speak. “He writes down for us what he needs or what he needs with a pen,” May says.
He has just written that he would like a thicker blanket because he is cold. “And he wrote that we are a great team,” she says happily. “Of course, that’s what you love to read,” says May and laughs.
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