Status: 04/04/2021 5:47 p.m.
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This number has been increasing for weeks: As of noon today, 4051 corona patients were treated in intensive care – the highest level since the beginning of February. Doctors warn of overloading the system within four weeks.
For the first time since the beginning of February, more than 4,000 corona patients are in the intensive care unit in Germany. Today on Easter Sunday 4051 people were treated in intensive care, writes the German Interdisciplinary Association for Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine (DIVI) in their daily corona report. That is 133 patients more than the day before. A good half of Covid patients in intensive care units are ventilated invasively.
The number of Covid intensive care patients reached its peak at the beginning of January, at that time there were more than 5,500 cases. When the second wave subsided, this number fell significantly; at the beginning of March there were fewer than 3,000 patients. With the increasing number of new infections in the third wave, the number of intensive care patients is also increasing again.
Intensive care physicians are sounding the alarm again
This happens with a delay, also because some time elapses between infection and admission to the hospital. Doctors and scientists have been urging a hard lockdown for days in order to reduce the number of infections and thereby also relieve the pressure on the clinics. If the current trend continues, “we will have reached the regular capacity limit in less than four weeks,” said Christian Karagiannidis recently to the “Rheinische Post”. He is the scientific director of the DIVI intensive care register.
The Robert Koch Institute (RKI) reported 12,196 new cases and a seven-day incidence of 127.0 on Sunday morning. This means that the number of new infections per 100,000 inhabitants and week is slightly lower than on Friday – when it was 134.0. However, the RKI’s corona numbers over the Easter days are not a reliable indicator of the infection rate, among other things because fewer tests and fewer reports are made. The numbers registered by the RKI therefore tend to be lower.
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