The coronavirus and the resulting disease Covid-19 is no worse than the flu – with this argument, critics are causing more and more attention. Motto: Half as wild, all scaremongering. But the comparison between corona and flu is limping. One difference in particular is crucial.
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The first week of the prescribed ban on contacts and the extensive shutdown in Germany has just ended, and more and more critics are seeing their hour coming. To bring their own view of the corona pandemic to people.
Your message, in short: The measures to contain the coronavirus are completely exaggerated.
Also read: Corona’s immunologist: “The reaction of politics is excessive”
Among other things, the immunologist Stefan Hockertz argued in a radio broadcast and came to the conclusion: “The reaction of politics is disproportionate.”
Panic is stirred up and cannons are shot at sparrows, after all, Sars-CoV-2 is no more dangerous than the flu virus.
Comparison with flu
Flu, again and again the comparison between Covid-19 and the flu.
On the one hand, this is understandable. Because everyone can imagine something under the flu.
Although we often mean something completely different colloquially. When we lie in bed with a fever for a few days and are plagued by cough and runny nose, we usually say: I have the flu.
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But from a medical point of view, this is not real flu. The real flu is called influenza and is not over within a few days. If you get influenza, you will be in really bad shape for much longer.
But the real problem is: The comparison between Covid-19 and flu is huge.
Crucial difference between flu and Covid-19
Not only because there is a vaccine against influenza and also drugs that – taken early – can relieve the symptoms.
It is of no use at all to contain the rampant coronavirus by comparing the two disease courses (which, according to experts, are similar), or to calculate the number of infected and dead people against each other.
Because you miss a very crucial difference between flu and Covid-19. And exactly this difference is central to the fact that public life in Germany has been shut down almost completely.
(There is no question that this is a terrible catastrophe economically and the consequences must be mitigated, but on a completely different page.)
“What are we so afraid of?”
“What are WE afraid of, who we stand in the emergency room and in the clinic at the front (on the verge of exhaustion for over 2 weeks)?”
This is how the doctor Michael J. Horn, who works in the emergency room of a clinic in Zwickau, puts it in an emotional post on Facebook.
Frustration over “hobbyists and wannabe immunologists”
Apparently written out of frustration at what he believes to be “hobbyists, amateur epidemologists, wannabe immunologists and sofa specialists”, who are now increasingly coming up with the argument that Corona is no worse than flu.
The new virus is on one point. This point is: time. The period in which there is a large number of diseases.
Also read: Coronavirus survey: 95 percent of Germans support restrictions
“Influenza, the forest meadow meadow flu, runs year after year over about 6 months from October and March with continuous illnesses, recoveries and deaths, “writes Michael J. Horn, a doctor from Zwickau.
6 months make a huge difference
These 6 months make a big difference. The flu is a classic winter disease in our latitudes. The majority of patients lie flat between October and March.
6 months – from the perspective of emergency doctors who are currently fighting for the lives of corona patients, an almost luxuriously long period.
Because if the number of sick people spreads over six months, this gives the doctors the opportunity to also distribute their capacities. Your workforce, the beds, the technical equipment in the intensive care units.
Even in normal winters, the doctors in the clinics have to treat seriously ill flu patients time and again.
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But the sick do not come all at once – as is the worst case with the coronavirus.
Which would push even a comparatively well-functioning health system like the German to its limits.
“We’re talking about the collapse of the clinics”
“The corona virus leads to a rapid increase in the number of people infected, including those who are seriously ill and those who require ventilation. We are talking about two weeks here,” writes Michael J. Horn. “We are talking about the collapse of the clinics within a short time Time.”
That sounds abstract. But what this could mean in concrete terms is illustrated by the senior physician at the Heinrich Braun Clinic in Zwickau with a simple calculation, using the example of his home town:
First, the number of patients who – statistically speaking – will probably be infected with the coronavirus. The background is virologists’ estimate that 40 to 60 percent of people are infected.
Too few beds, too few ventilators
According to this, around 150,000 corona patients can be expected in the Zwickau district, where around 300,000 people live. Around 15,000 (10 percent) of these are estimated to be seriously ill and must be treated in hospital.
But the 15,000 patients in the four hospitals in the district only have around 2,000 beds.
That is 13,000 beds too little, if in the worst case all have to be treated at the same time or in a timely manner.
If you also assume that, according to experts, around 1 percent of corona patients suffer from lung failure and therefore need ventilation, there are 1,500 patients.
1,500 patients whose survival depends on the availability of a ventilator.
However, according to Michael J. Horn, there are “maybe 100, maybe 200, rather fewer” of these devices in the Zwickau clinics.
In any case: far from enough.
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“Even if we were able to double the number of beds, we could only treat a fraction of the sick,” wrote Michael J. Horn.
Not to forget all the other patients who also receive intensive medical care in their lung cells without corona virus and who also need ventilation.
Because, of course, there are also people who have a serious traffic accident, a stroke or a heart attack during the corona crisis. Every day, all over Germany. One thinks of them far too rarely at the moment.
For these reasons, virologists – and the politicians they advise – have given the motto: We have to stretch the number of cases of illness over as long a period as possible.
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And because the corona virus is transmitted particularly easily and very quickly from person to person, it must be prevented that too many people become infected at once.
The number of infected people in Germany has already climbed to 66,885 within a few weeks (as of March 31, 2020, Johns Hopkins University). 645 people died in this country from Covid-19.
That’s why the contact block, that’s why the shutdown.
Worse than in any flu winter
So that there are no terrible situations in Germany as we see them now on television pictures, from completely overloaded hospitals in northern Italy, Madrid, or even New York.
This is also an absolutely exceptional situation there. Worse than in any flu winter in recent years.
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