Mr. Steele, We talk about your work regularly As a senior doctor in the isolation ward for Covid-19 patients in Darmstadt Clinic. How’s it going?
There is currently one patient with new coronary pneumonia in the general ward, and two critically ill patients are being treated in the intensive care unit. Unsurprisingly, there were only a few cases in the hospital this summer. We continue to sequence, and we have seen more and more cases of delta variants.
Is there a difference in the course of the disease to be observed?
In these few individual cases, there is no law to read, and that would be over-interpreted. The big picture should not be inferred from individual cases.
If you look at the big picture, there are conflicting reports: are delta variants more dangerous or less dangerous?
Rough statistics can be deceptive. In the UK, there is no statistical difference between vaccinated and unvaccinated. The hospitalization rate there is increasing, but not so much. This is affected by the number of vaccinated among the infected, which leads to a drop in hospitalization rates. In states with very low vaccination rates in the United States—such as Mississippi and Alabama—mortality and hospitalization rates are increasing significantly. Therefore, we hypothesize that the delta variant is by far the most dangerous variant for unvaccinated individual patients. Whether it is an infection or a severe course. Recent research confirms these concerns. This must be clearly distinguished from the overall impression, that is, for a society where many people are vaccinated, the triangle wave may be relatively light. In the statistical data of a large number of vaccinated people, the risk of unvaccinated individuals is getting smaller and smaller, which may lead to a false sense of security. If you have not been vaccinated and are infected with the Delta variant, you are at the highest risk of suffering a severe disease course of all the variants that you spread in Germany.
Despite the high incidence, what else can be observed in the UK after the UK has stopped measures?
This is a big experiment, and in my opinion, it involves a lot of risk. I will not agree with this, but I am very happy to see the results. The vaccination rate is high and there are few measures-this will soon show whether the number of hospitalizations will rise sharply and whether there will be more deaths again. Regardless of the result, science will make great discoveries. But the risk is too high for me.
Sanitation Committee Jens Spann Say 200 is the new incidence value of 50. How do you deal with the incidence value?
