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Health Minister Klose and Covid doctor Çelik: “The situation in the hospitals is tense – help prevent overload with a vaccination.”
Hesse’s Minister of Health Kai Klose, together with Dr. med. Cihan Çelik, senior physician and head of a COVID station at the Darmstadt Clinic, emphasized the need to be vaccinated against the coronavirus at a press conference in Wiesbaden. “The current situation in the hospitals should only be a foretaste of autumn. From the point of view of a clinically active doctor in a Covid ward, there is no doubt about it: The vaccination has a very great benefit for the patients and protects them from severe courses, ”said Çelik. “For vaccinated people without previous illnesses, a Covid infection means in most cases an infection of the upper respiratory tract,” said the doctor.
Minister Klose discussed the situation in the six Hessian hospital supply areas (see map).
IVENA special situation records the current situation in hospitals
This shows that the situation is currently a little more tense in southern Hesse than in northern Hesse. However, the load situation in the individual supply areas has always differed, according to Klose: “The Hessian Ministry for Social Affairs and Integration has therefore taken these differences into account by means of regionally differentiated and situationally adapted measures. In the course of the pandemic, we developed an instrument for this: With the IVENA special situation, we record the situation of each individual hospital on a daily basis, with our weekly decrees we ensure that the load is evenly distributed across all hospitals, with the Tele-COVID app we have networked the entire intensive care medicine in Hessen and with the coordination office for secondary transports we have improved and accelerated the possibility of relocating patients if necessary and thus relieving individual regions in a targeted manner. “
Dr. Cihan Çelik confirmed that the situation in the Darmstadt Clinic and many other Hessian hospitals is already tense: “There are fewer Covid patients than in the previous waves and thanks to the vaccinations we will hopefully not see these patient numbers either. But since the rest of the hospital’s operations run normally, fewer staff are available to care for them. We are already working in a three-shift system again. In order to ensure that non-Covid cases are taken care of without disruptions and to protect the people in the health system, we must prevent the number of patients from increasing sharply in autumn. “
The risk of illness for unvaccinated people is much higher
A look at the occupancy figures of the Hessian intensive care units makes it clear that the risk for unvaccinated people to get seriously ill with Covid is many times higher: Currently 147 (including 16 suspected cases, as of September 23, 2021) are infected with the SARS Cov-2 virus infected patients are treated in intensive care in Hessen – 80 percent of them are unvaccinated and 15 percent are fully vaccinated. The majority of those who are fully vaccinated belong to the so-called vulnerable groups.
Vaccination as a shared responsibility
Vaccination is not just about protecting your own health: “To still not be vaccinated means avoiding the collective responsibility towards children under the age of twelve, for whom no vaccine has yet been approved – and it is showing lack of solidarity towards those who cannot be vaccinated because of an illness, ”said Health Minister Kai Klose. “The figures show that the people who need intensive care because of Covid-19 are largely unvaccinated. If their number continues to rise, we have to protect our health system against overload again. “
Since the new ordinance on protection against the coronavirus came into force, the pandemic situation in Hesse is no longer only assessed according to the classic seven-day incidence. With the two new headline indicators, hospitalization incidence and intensive care bed occupancy, the focus is primarily on the situation in hospitals. “We take a very close look at how the overall exposure to the Hessian hospitals is developing, but we also continue to consult the incidence of infections as an early warning system. One thing is clear: If the limit values defined in the ordinance are exceeded, the state government must tighten the measures again ”, said Minister Klose:“ In order to prevent this and to protect our health system, we ask you: Get yourself and your family vaccinated! ”
(Text: PM Hessian Ministry for Social Affairs and Integration)
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