In the intensive care units, unvaccinated people in particular struggle with severe Covid diseases. But it also hits vaccinated people again and again.
Berlin – About one in ten of the patients treated in intensive care units for corona in August and September was fully vaccinated.
This emerges from a response from the Federal Ministry of Health, which was sent at the end of September, to a request from the left-wing member of the Bundestag, Sahra Wagenknecht. The newspapers of the Funke media group had reported about it first.
The information roughly corresponds to earlier statements by Federal Health Minister Jens Spahn (CDU). At the beginning of September he said in advertising for the corona vaccination that 90 percent of Covid patients in intensive care units were unvaccinated. Later he spoke of 90 to 95 percent.
In the ministry’s answer, reference is made to the weekly reports of the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), in which the number of vaccination breakthroughs is published. According to the government, a vaccination breakthrough is a corona infection with “clinical symptoms” in a fully vaccinated person.
A total of 11,419 corona patients received intensive care from February to mid-September. A vaccination breakthrough was assumed in 210 of them (1.84 percent). In the period from mid-August to mid-September, 1186 corona patients were in intensive care units, 119 of them were assumed to have had a breakthrough vaccination, which corresponds to 10.03 percent of the cases.
When asked by the Funke newspapers, the RKI emphasized: “It is to be expected that more vaccination breakthroughs will be recorded over time, as more and more people are generally vaccinated and Sars-CoV-2 is currently spreading again more and more. This increases the likelihood of coming into contact with the virus as a fully vaccinated person. “The president of the intensive care medicine association DIVI, Gernot Marx, said that patients with severe and fatal corona courses were unvaccinated in almost all cases. In addition, the vaccination breakthrough mostly affects people whose “immune system is weakened by chemotherapy or permanent cortisone treatment, or who are older than 80 years”.
In Germany, according to RKI data from Tuesday, 65.3 percent of the population are fully vaccinated. The rate among adults is 75.9 percent. According to this, 68.6 percent of all citizens are vaccinated against the virus at least once, and 79.4 percent of adults. According to the Federal Ministry of Health, more than 54 million citizens are fully vaccinated.
The RKI assumes that more people among adults are probably vaccinated than the data suggest. In a report at the beginning of October, for example, it was said that the rate for people who were once and completely vaccinated from the age of 18 could be up to 5 percentage points higher.
Among the children and adolescents aged 12 to 17 years, 43.3 percent have now received at least one first injection, 37.2 percent are fully vaccinated.
“Everyone should use the opportunity to protect themselves from Corona!” Tweeted Federal Health Minister Jens Spahn (CDU) on Tuesday.
Over a million people in Germany have already received a booster vaccination. The RKI gave the value on Tuesday as 1,044,188. dpa
