Around 500 people in Germany are currently so seriously ill with Covid-19 that they have to be treated in hospital. There could be three times as many by the end of the week. The German hospitals are prepared for this, but are demanding financial support.
German hospitals expect the number of corona patients in the clinics to increase drastically in the next few days. If there are 20,000 confirmed cases of infection in Germany by the end of the week, it can be expected that up to 1,500 patients will have to be treated in hospitals, Gerald Gass, President of the German Hospital Society (DKG), told the newspapers of the Funke Media Group.
According to him, this would triple the number of corona patients currently treated in the clinics. Gass emphasized that the hospitals were prepared for such an increase in the number of corona patients. “It wouldn’t overwhelm you.” According to the latest figures from the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) on Monday evening, there are now 6012 confirmed corona infections in Germany. 13 of the infected died.
The DKG president said that the pandemic is now about “expanding the capacity of the intensive care units day by day”. In two or three months, it will be possible to increase the number of intensive care beds from the current 28,000 to around 34,000. The number of ventilators, currently 20,000, must also be increased.
“If the number of corona patients requiring treatment continues to increase, in extreme cases half of the patients in the intensive care units will consist of corona patients in the next few months,” said Gass. The hospitals would have to postpone up to 50 percent of their usual services, the DKG president explained. They had already started to cancel patients with predictable interventions. At the moment, the affected patients have “a lot of understanding”. But many saw themselves as urgently in need of treatment, said Gass, adding: “In individual cases there will be complaints.”
The DKG president asked for a financial “protective shield for all hospitals” this week so that clinics did not go bankrupt in the Corona crisis. “We will not be able to cope with the epidemic without exceptional financing measures,” he warned in the “Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung”.
Public and private clinics could only consistently focus on the treatment of corona patients “if they can now quickly get the absolute certainty that the cancellations of other treatments will not lead to liquidity bottlenecks,” said Gass. Otherwise, a number of clinics would soon be facing bankruptcy.
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