After a corona outbreak, an admission freeze is again imposed – with a few exceptions, emergency services should not go to the Spandauer Vivantes Clinic until February 25th. The state-owned clinic group justifies this with 55 infections with the virus variant B117 detected in the hospital. With 600 beds, the clinic is one of the largest hospitals in the city. According to Vivantes, employees are now checked daily for infection by means of a rapid test, with more precise PCR tests being carried out twice a week.
There are 38 emergency hospitals in Berlin, whose rescue centers are still working even during the pandemic. Only three weeks ago a complete quarantine was ordered by the office for the Vivantes-Humboldt-Klinikum in Reinickendorf. Patients were isolated, nurses and doctors were only allowed to stay at home, they commuted to the clinic – sometimes in shuttle buses. The quarantine was lifted after ten days.
Back then, too, it was about B117, the Sars-CoV-2 mutation that was first discovered in Great Britain. There have now been at least 109 registered infections with the British virus variant in Berlin’s state hospitals – these are the cases reported by Vivantes and the also state-owned Charité.
The two large clinic sponsors run the “Labor Berlin”, which has been systematically testing positive corona samples for virus mutations for weeks. Only Vivantes and the Charité publish figures on B117 cases. But doctors from other hospitals also say that there were patients who were apparently infected with the British variant. So far, the discovered cases with the mutations have not been made public separately across Berlin – only the corona infections as a whole.
Vivantes Board of Directors: All clinics and laboratories should report B117 publicly
At Vivantes, some now want the other hospitals to report publicly when said mutations were discovered on their wards. Johannes Danckert, who is responsible for health care on the Vivantes board of directors, told Tagesspiegel on Friday: “A solid overview of the infection process is the best prerequisite for containing further spread – this should apply to all clinics and laboratories.”
The experts at the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) are also looking for traces of the more contagious corona mutations – the British, South African and Brazilian ones. They assume that the proportion of infections caused by these virus variants will increase.
Almost 1370 corona infections from hospital stays in Berlin
Outbreaks in healthcare facilities keep coming back. In Berlin, between the start of the pandemic between March 2020 and the end of January 2021, almost 1,370 corona cases were recorded, in which those affected apparently only became infected in a clinic.
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This emerges from a response from State Secretary for Health Martin Matz (SPD) to a request from FDP MP Florian Kluckert, which was published on Friday. “For reasons of plausibility, it cannot be ruled out that patients who were infected with corona in hospital died,” writes Matz. Most of the patients were infected in December, at the height of the second wave, in Berlin’s clinics: 515 cases were recorded at that time.
Nationwide, patients are said to have been infected with Sars-CoV-2 in around 22,000 cases only in hospitals, practices, dialysis facilities and ambulances. The German press agency reported. However, 66,000 employees in these facilities have been infected with Corona. These data do not include cases from nursing homes and senior facilities.
According to the Senate Health Administration on Friday, the number of active infections in Berlin fell to 7,095. 998 corona patients are currently being treated in a hospital.
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