30 percent more intensive care patients in one week – Anschober: “Lockdown is the only chance”.
For six weeks, the number of people actively infected with SARS-CoV-2 in Austria increased: Also on Sunday, 5,665 new infections were reported, but the number of active cases decreased slightly for the first time since October 2 and fell by 677 persons to 76,453, because 6,259 persons were reported to have recovered. A further 83 people died, however, the number of deaths increased to 1,829, and the number of intensive care patients rose by 30 percent in one week.
More than 200,000 known infections with the novel coronavirus, exactly 203,956, have occurred since the outbreak of the pandemic in Austria, with a status of 9.30 am. On Sunday, 4,178 people were hospitalized, 599 of them in intensive care – 15 more than yesterday. Within a week, the number of patients in intensive care units rose by almost 30 percent from 459, according to daily reports from the Interior and Health Ministries. “And this shows the dramatic nature of the situation very clearly: If this growth continues at this level, we would reach the limits of our capacity in intensive care units as early as November, and in many hospitals and the first federal states even much earlier,” said Health Minister Rudolf Anschober in a statement.
The hard lockdown starting on Tuesday was “the only chance to reduce severe congestion in intensive care units, the last chance to prevent triage in Austrian hospitals,” Anschober appealed to the population to implement the measures consistently: “20 days of drastic reduction of contacts by phone and Skype instead of visits, 20 days of home office wherever possible, 20 days of avoiding family meetings and celebrations – and we can protect the lives of many people with this.
As far as the number of new infections is concerned, they are divided among the federal states of Austria as follows:
Burgenland: 157
Carinthia: 333
Lower Austria: 1.102
Upper Austria: 1.041
Salzburg: 245
Styria: 561
Tyrol: 848
Vorarlberg: 272
Vienna: 1.106
- hp, with reports from sozialministerium.at and oe24.at
This post has already been read 773 times!