Wesel district. This summer, more people seem to be sick than usual. Is it still a cold or already Corona? A classification.
School holidays, travel time – and now cold season? At the moment, there are always people in the waiting rooms of GP practices in the Wesel district who are coughing, have a fever, and complain of a sore throat. Is this still a “summer flu”, i.e. a cold, or is it Corona again?
This is often not entirely clear, although according to the Wesel district there is still a legal obligation to report corona. Many people no longer even bother to test themselves for Covid-19. But summer is also the time of big festivals and concerts where people celebrate together in a small space.
Despite weak data, there is an increase in clinical and laboratory diagnostic reports of Covid-19 cases in the Wesel district: In the first five months of last year, the number of registered Covid-19 cases was several times higher than this year, but this was reversed in June: 148 cases were registered then, compared to just 19 in the previous year, and in July there were 265 compared to 30. Compared to the pandemic years, this is a vanishingly small number of cases. One thing is clear: the number of unreported cases is likely to be significantly higher.
There is no reason to worry. Dr. Michael Wefelnberg, medical director of the MVZ Ärzte am Niederrhein in Hünxe, sums up the situation as follows: “We cannot currently speak of a summer peak,” says the doctor, “it is more of a small hill.” The number of Covid patients has increased slightly, but that is no reason to worry. Of course, there are also normal colds, which people like to call “summer flu.” “But it is not like in winter, when 20 people with colds sit unannounced in the waiting room.” Since the MVZ is a very large practice, he has a good view of how things are developing. Am I even allowed to go to a doctor’s office these days with Covid symptoms? “Yes, but only with a mask,” says Wefelnberg.
Despite its increased numbers, the district cannot identify any trend at the municipal level either. Covid cases are reported by doctors, hospitals and laboratories. At the federal level, the RKI continues to see stable case numbers. Selected hospitals and doctor’s offices report their cases directly to the RKI, and this is how the statistics are created.
While the classic colds are not notifiable, influenza is. However, there is actually no season for it at the moment, the numbers are very low, there was not a single case in July.
Not only the Wesel district and the RKI are following the developments, the AOK Rheinland/Hamburg is also taking a close look and has found that while 4,482 AOK insured people in the Wesel district reported sick in July 2023, this year the number has already risen to 5,795, 29.3 percent more than in the same month last year. The AOK statistics provide an insight into the cold situation. According to them, respiratory diseases in particular seemed to plague patients residing in the district, the number of which grew from 758 last July to 1,286 this year. In addition, there is the diagnosis “Jo6.9”, technical jargon for acute infection of the upper respiratory tract. This points to Covid, but there is no confirmation from the laboratory. Here, the health insurance company recorded a good doubling of cases compared to July last year.
The proportion of all sick notes diagnosed with respiratory diseases has risen from 16.9 percent in July last year to 22.2 percent in the past month. In fact, this is more of a hill than a peak. Nevertheless, while respiratory diseases have doubled overall at AOK Rheinland/Hamburg (the comparison month is always July), the increase in the Wesel district was as much as 70 percent, according to AOK.
The NRW wastewater monitoring also shows how intensively Covid-19 is currently spreading: the viral load is monitored in selected sewage treatment plants, in the Wesel district these are the Dinslaken and Emschermündung sewage treatment plants. The results allow conclusions to be drawn about the overall development in the district. According to this, the viral load from May to mid-July is predominantly recorded as “increasing sharply”, i.e. it increased by more than 15 percent.
All of these patients who take sick leave, plus those who are insured with another health insurance company and the numerous people who don’t even go to the doctor, usually come to the pharmacy to get relief. “That’s noticeable,” says pharmacist Werner Henking. There is currently an increased demand for cold remedies, “which could be because the immune system is still more vulnerable after the years of corona,” he suspects. The good news: there are enough cold remedies for self-medication in pharmacies. It gets more difficult if someone is prescribed antibiotics. These are still not sufficiently available, Henking regrets.
