BERLIN (DPA) – Bernese epidemiologist Christian Althaus has recommended building up the number of daily hospitalizations as a measure to tighten coronavirus measures.

We can turn our attention to Switzerland, where 120 daily new admissions of COVID-19 patients serve as the threshold value for further measures. “With respect to Germany, it would then be a factor of 10 more, so there should be about twelve hundred hospitalizations per day,” said the expert at an event at the Science Media Center.

According to epidemiologists, many European countries are currently entering a phase in which many people have already been fully vaccinated, but the virus is still likely to spread more widely. “At some point the incidence will be relatively high,” Althaus says.

A reliable database is important

However, at the moment it is difficult to predict how much impact this will have on the health system. An up-to-date and reliable database is important for such assessments, emphasized the expert from the University of Bern.

For Reinhard Busse, head of the Department of Health Care Management at TU Berlin, the root of the matter lies right there. One problem is that the Intensive Care Register of the German Interdisciplinary Association for Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine (DIVI) in Germany collects case-related – and no personal – data. “A patient who is transferred from one hospital to another counts twice, and this is often the case with Covid patients,” Base said.

According to modeler Andreas Schupert of RWTH Aachen University, the time has come to get good and reliable data. Until then, the seven-day event will continue to provide a good orientation, said Schupert, who, like Busse and Althaus, participated in the Science Media Center program.