“Vaccination does not prevent the third wave, the third wave is growing,” the minister said as he visited one of the vaccination centers in Berlin on Monday, following the Easter holidays. Spahn also described the situation in Germany’s intensive care units as “worrying” and said that the number of people treated there increased to more than 4,000 over the Easter weekend. More than half of them are on invasive ventilation.
Spahn’s somewhat alarmist projections were, however, criticized by the head of Berlin’s IGES Health Research Institute, Bertram Haeussler. A medical statistician, Haeussler told Die Welt newspaper earlier this week that Germany is not seeing a nationwide Covid-19 third wave but rather several infection clusters mostly located near the border with the Czech Republic and Poland as well as around large meat factories.
When the models predicting the third wave show exponential growth, “it always sounds as if it was exclusively the work of the creepy mutant B.117; as if mankind is defenseless,” Haeussler said, referring to the British Covid-19 variant deemed more contagious.“The problems of the current wave are the same as those of the first and the second ones,” he said. “If there are such high incidences in these border regions that they significantly raise the national average [infection rate], then the lockdown in all of Germany does not look like a particularly clever [decision].”
“Yet, all I see are regional clusters and hotspots; counties that have not managed to get their problems under control since the beginning of the pandemic,” the statistician said, calling on the government to develop a “tailor-made” approach focused on the meat factories as well as workers and truck drivers coming from Eastern Europe instead of just forcing regions into lockdowns.