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In July, the Vogelsberg Health Department recorded an increase in corona infections. © Christine Heil
Scratchy throat, cough, tiredness, headache – it could just be a cold or it could be corona. After a very quiet spring, corona numbers in the Vogelsberg rose in July. This is shown by the statistics of the Vogelsberg Health Department. From the point of view of the Alsfeld family doctor Jochen Müller, the situation is nevertheless relaxed. “It is not really threatening,” is his assessment.
The number of reported corona cases in Germany in July was about twice as high as in the previous year (we reported on August 10). This is also reflected in the numbers reported to the Vogelsberg Health Department.
For May 2024, the Vogelsberg district statistics show zero cases (2023: 29 cases), in June five cases (2023: eleven), in July 26 cases (2023: twelve), and in August so far eight (as of mid-August 2024).
“It’s a bit mixed. At the beginning of the summer holidays, we all had the feeling that a wave was coming because there were significantly more corona cases than in the spring,” says Alsfeld family doctor Jochen Müller. But that then subsided again. Müller is the second chairman of the Vogelsberg family doctor association and asked colleagues in the Vogelsberg. Admittedly, “not everyone responded.” Nevertheless, something can be deduced from this, even if it is “more of a mood picture.” However, he thinks that the number of cases is higher than that available to the Vogelsberg health department. “It is certainly more.”
What is happening, says Müller, is the frequent occurrence of corona cases, for example recently in Schlitz. Doctors there reported around 20 cases within a week. Müller suspects that the possible reason for the frequent occurrence is that people are becoming infected at parties, which are more common in summer. When corona has occurred more frequently in one place in the past, the reason was often that “everyone sat together and then got infected.” But of course he doesn’t know exactly what happened in Schlitz.
In his practice, Müller has had to deal with very different courses of illness. “There are courses that are completely harmless, like a cold,” he reports. Patients whose corona test then comes back positive said that they had not expected to be infected. Then again, there are also individual cases in which patients had been seriously ill for 14 days. Hospitalization “or anything like that” was not necessary, however. He has “not seen pneumonia due to corona for a long time.” And: It feels like corona is circulating less in Alsfeld than in Schlitz at the moment. “There are isolated cases,” says the general practitioner.
Dr. Johannes Roth, chief physician of internal medicine/gastroenterology at Lauterbach’s Eichhof Hospital, confirms this overall assessment for the past few months: “Corona was more of a marginal event.”
Younger people with symptoms were generally treated on an outpatient basis, and older patients were usually discharged after one or two days. Only in one case did a patient with various additional illnesses have to be treated in the intensive care unit. The situation is also relaxed at the district hospital in Alsfeld. As of the middle of the month, no corona patients were being treated there as inpatients. The relevance of corona has changed in the “last few months,” the district hospital says. “It is treated according to standardized procedures, similar to other infectious diseases.” Exceptions are outbreaks, i.e. the frequent occurrence at a certain time. However, something like this can also happen at any time with other infectious diseases. Such cases are dealt with by testing and isolation. The employees at the district hospital have now “developed a great deal of routine in dealing with corona.”
From the perspective of Alsfeld family doctor Müller, this is a problem: people hardly test themselves anymore. His practice asks patients to test themselves before coming to the practice if they think they have an infectious disease – “if they have a cough or a cold.” But not everyone does that. Other doctor’s practices in the area have also confirmed this impression – the population has the feeling that they no longer need to test themselves.
The family doctor does not currently see a significant increase in other respiratory diseases. “It is relatively quiet. There are individual bacterial infections such as tonsillitis and things like that.” However, the number of cases is within the “normal frequency range, it is not noticeably frequent.”
Demand for vaccination?
There is a newly adapted vaccine against the coronavirus. For whom is a booster vaccination possible in view of the cold season and when? The Vogelsberg Health Department refers to the Standing Vaccination Commission: The STIKO recommends an annual booster vaccination, which should be administered in the autumn. The recommendation applies to people over 60 years of age and high-risk patients.
General practitioner Jochen Müller expects that the “vaccination season” against the coronavirus will probably start in his practice in the second half of September. At the moment there is hardly any demand.
