According to the RKI, there is an increase in corona cases, especially among adolescents and younger adults. Is this good news because they rarely get seriously ill – or a harbinger of what is to come in other age groups?
Berlin – The current increase in the corona incidence in Germany hardly affects seniors, but it does affect younger people who are still unvaccinated more often.
The Robert Koch Institute (RKI) has the highest values of 32 cases per 100,000 inhabitants for the past week among 15 to 24-year-olds. In the case of children, the RKI data show comparatively small increases, but experts had also expected the summer holidays to have a dampening effect on infections. For the intensive care units, the trend towards younger infected people may initially seem like a good sign; However, experts consider renewed peak loads similar to previous corona waves to be possible, depending on the development.
“We have seen in the previous waves with Sars-CoV-2 that the age group of 15 to 34 year olds only developed a very small proportion of severe courses that had to be treated in intensive care,” said the President of the German Interdisciplinary Association for intensive and emergency medicine (Divi), Gernot Marx, on Friday the German Press Agency. “That affected well below one percent of those infected. For comparison: for people over 60 it is almost 15 percent. ”But it is not yet possible to say how things will work with the new Delta variant. The focus is on countries like Great Britain and Spain, which are a few weeks ahead in development.
“Many millions not yet vaccinated”
“In relative terms, thanks to the vaccinations, fewer sick people with the Delta variant will have a more severe course – you can already see that in Great Britain,” said Marx. “What we always have to keep in mind, however, is that we have not yet vaccinated many, many millions of people or not yet completely vaccinated them. If the rate of new infections is many times higher, the number of patients can be just as high as in the second and third waves. ”The example of Great Britain shows the magnitudes that are possible: the number of new infections per 100,000 people within a week among young adults there was just over 1150 – the highest value ever recorded since the outbreak of the pandemic last year.
Scenarios that the RKI presented on Thursday for autumn and winter show that, depending on the vaccination rate achieved and the behavior of the population, in the worst case, over 6000 Covid-19 cases could end up in intensive care units at the same time. It urged us to take preventive action now.
Drosten is concerned
The Berlin virologist Christian Drosten also stated that a significantly higher vaccination rate than currently needed to avoid a heavy winter wave. He is “increasingly concerned” that the vaccination progress is not going faster. According to his assessment, many people feel like they are in a false sense of security because the incidences are currently low.
The professional world is now faced with the question of how many infected people can be admitted without causing problems for the hospitals. The view of the incidence figures must change as the vaccination rate increases, so Drosten. “At the moment there is a progressive decoupling between incidence and disease severity.” At the moment, the situation in the intensive care units is unproblematic, says Divi expert Marx. “The vast majority of the patients we are currently treating have been there since the third wave.” Only individual cases with Covid-19 would be added to the locations.
“As long as we do not see any consequences in hospitals, the goal of vaccinations has been achieved,” said the President of the Society for Virology, Ralf Bartenschlager, of the dpa. “The virus will not go away anyway, it will come back every year, especially in autumn and winter, and anyone who has not been vaccinated by then will very likely be infected.” The Heidelberg University expert called for the incidence to be low over the summer think that you will benefit from this in winter.
Thanks to the vaccinations, Bartenschlager does not expect the fourth wave to slosh through all age groups like the previous ones. “Above all, it will affect non-immune people, whose numbers will decrease over time. For some groups, such as children, one has to assume that the virus will be faster than the vaccination, but this group also very rarely becomes seriously ill. “
Demand for tests in schools
Meanwhile, the President of the German Teachers’ Association, Heinz-Peter Meidinger, urged great caution against corona at the beginning of the new school year. It needs “a phase with special increased infection protection measures in schools,” he told the newspapers of the Funke media group. In the first one to two months of the new school year, for example, “a full mask requirement also applies during lessons for all ages”. In addition, in his opinion, the regular rapid tests should be continued, “ideally three times a week”. The President of the German Medical Association, Klaus Reinhardt, put even more pressure in the Funke newspapers. The goal must be to enable daily tests before the start of classes, he said. The new school year begins at the beginning of August in the first federal states. dpa
