Berlin center – Lukas Murajda is carrying a backpack on his back, a pocket in front of his chest, a flat cap and an FFP2 mask. He has a cell phone on his ear when he arrives at the office. Afterwards he can get a tent for the vaccination campaign, he calls into the phone, then he has to hang up. The “pandemic stick” is already waiting for him.
He has been on a crisis mission for 20 months. Since then he has been chasing his appointments. Lukas Murajda has headed the health department in Berlin’s Mitte district for a good two years. The pandemic broke out six months after he took the job. The first corona case in the whole city was diagnosed in Mitte. On March 1, 2020, in a shared apartment in Wedding, Murajda went there in the evening, accompanied the first patient to the hospital, and phoned half the night.
So it officially started. The first wave, followed by a second that quickly merged into the third. Now the violent fourth wave is here, the numbers are higher than ever. “Actually a tsunami,” says Murajda. In his backpack he has, among other things, protective goggles, protective gloves and a packet of raspberry-flavored glucose.
He puts down his luggage and takes a chair in the middle of the large conference room. During the pandemic, the health department moved into a freshly renovated building on Turmstrasse, four floors, the “pandemic staff” meets under the roof. Eight women and men, the windows are open, all wearing FFP2 masks.
It is the day that the epidemic of national emergency ends, Murajda mentions it in greeting. Nobody in the room wastes time getting upset.
Instead, an employee presents numbers. Seven-day incidence in Berlin on that day: 348.6. Seven-day incidence in the Mitte district: 377.2. Receipt of electronic case reports and faxes for corona cases in the Central Health Department: 800 to 1000 a day. In addition, up to 200 additional reports and hundreds of e-mails are received. School classes with infected children in the district: currently around 100 per week.
The emergency is over, the numbers keep showing new records. One is politics, the other is reality, the gap between the two seems to continue to grow.
“We can no longer manage to process everything,” says the employee. And: “Our true incidence is higher.”
Callbacks from the office? Completely utopian
The health authorities are actually supposed to track the contacts of infected people and quarantine people who might have been infected. Murajda had previously been to a meeting with all the other medical officers in the city and said: “Nobody can make the contacts anymore.” All other major cities in Germany could no longer keep up.
The employee lists other problems. There are many inquiries from the police, suspected quarantine violations, they too land on the daily growing mountain of concerns that no one can deal with. Everywhere in the health department, even in departments that have nothing to do with fighting pandemics, corona findings are received on all fax machines, by e-mail and by phone.
“People are trying on all lines,” says Murajda. He cannot blame them, but he can no longer ensure that everyone is called back from the office. Completely utopian. If you are lucky, you will get a letter. The office is now also allowed to send e-mails to citizens, but the encryption program used to protect the content is complicated.
The Central Health Department would need 96 employees to follow up the contacts in each case of infection as it is prescribed. This has been calculated for incidences up to 50. How many people do we have right now? Murajda asks into the room. Most days around 25 people are there, is the answer.
A year ago, in the third wave, the office had more than 200 contact follow-up staff. Many came from other offices, authorities, foundations. They occupied the Walther-Rathenau-Saal in Wedding Town Hall and for a few months even an exhibition hall in Charlottenburg. Now Murajda urgently needs more people, but at the same time he has no idea where to put them.
When the session ended after almost two hours, he took both of his cell phones off the table and said, “Now they’ll both ring at the same time.” He missed about twenty calls.
He walks down four floors with a rucksack, bag, mask, speaks on the phone, drives to the Twelve Apostles Church in the company car that they have had since the summer. He sets the navigation device and also searches for the route on one of the cell phones. He still doesn’t know his way around Berlin, apart from where he works. Murajda is 41, comes from Slovakia and worked in Austria before coming to Berlin. A public health specialist and epidemiologist, he studied the history of outbreaks before this pandemic started.
He could only fight the first to third waves with tests, explaining protective measures and imposing quarantines. In the fourth wave he has a new, highly effective drug, vaccinations. His office has been able to vaccinate since the summer. At the moment Murajda is trying to offer a vaccination campaign in the district every weekday. He often also vaccinates himself.
The church is located near Nollendorfplatz in Schöneberg, the border with Mitte is not far. The vaccination campaign has been agreed with the Tempelhof-Schöneberg Health Department. During the journey Murajda hears that a tent is not needed.
People you would otherwise not be able to reach
It is half past two when he arrives at the church, and two long queues wind around the building. A vaccination line and one for the food distribution. It’s cold, it’s drizzling, Berlin November.
The vaccination queue in the church stretches from the last bench to the first, people at the front say that they have been waiting for hours. Murajda greets the doctors who are giving advice at a table to the right of the altar. Via a corridor he reaches the room in which two colleagues from the health department are already pulling up syringes and “stabbing”, as Murajda says.
He asks if everything is okay, throws off his bags, and considers opening another vaccination room in a second church room. Or a second table for the obligatory advice? The Sexual Health Center, which is part of Murajda’s office, organized the appointment, and many social workers from the area recruited, including the community. The rush is huge, like everywhere in Berlin where vaccinations are taking place these days.
This time people came who cannot be easily reached. People from assisted living groups are waiting, older couples who know someone from the community, homeless people who otherwise come to church for the food. Nobody had to make an appointment digitally or struggle through a hotline. Some hold the flyer with the invitation in their hands until it is their turn.
When an argument breaks out between a couple of men about who is allowed to advance to the vaccination next, Lukas Murajda has an idea. Would you like to help? He asks me. You would have to give numbers to the people who were advised and now have to wait a second time, he says. He brings me paper that I can use to make notes and disappears to help in the vaccination room.
The numbers calm the situation, just as Murjada had foreseen, I distribute them at the conference table. Bayram Bülbül and Marija Targosz, who usually work as doctors at the Center for Sexual Health on Potsdamer Strasse, ask everyone who comes how they feel. “Today we can offer you Biontech or Moderna,” they say. They hand out yellow vaccination books. They advise in Bulgarian, English, Turkish, Russian.
Many who come have already been vaccinated – often with the product from Johnson & Johnson, which was used until the summer for many vaccination campaigns without prior notice, for example for the homeless, because all that was needed was a syringe. Unfortunately, with this vaccine, protection is particularly rapid. Everyone who got it desperately needs a booster. Others want to be vaccinated for the third time.
When will I get my certificate for 2G?
There are also people waiting who want to be vaccinated for the first time. A man bows his head, shifts around in the chair, he is afraid of side effects, the doctor explains to him what could happen to him. “It’s your choice,” she says. The man dares. Three Russian women with full shopping bags encourage each other. One woman says she has no permanent address and is afraid of being alone if the side effects come. But she is also afraid of being excluded even more than before. When will I get the certificate for 2G? Many ask. The doctors give them small pieces of paper with a second appointment. In three weeks, back to church.
It is almost half past six when the last person in line gets his vaccination. Number 121.
The team from the Central Health Department has eight syringes left in which the Biontech vaccine has already been drawn up. Lukas Murajda, who started to work at six in the morning, initially in the home office, and has not eaten anything apart from two cups of coffee in the morning, not even a piece of glucose, decides to take the syringes to the city mission at the main train station.
There he himself vaccinated twenty homeless people the day before, and another doctor will vaccinate there that evening.
Murajda walks past another queue on the site of the city mission, people are queuing for the emergency overnight stay. A man points to his stomach that he is in pain. He speaks Romanian, Murajda answers in Italian, a doctor is coming soon.
Behind the emergency overnight stay is the quarantine station for the homeless, where the coordinator, the doctor Sarah Klaes, is waiting. Murajda has telephoned her several times from the church and tried to find places for people who have to isolate themselves. “Fortunately, some guests could be dismissed,” says Klaes now.
People who want to sleep in emergency nights have to do quick tests there in the evening. The virus should not spread in the bedrooms. If the tests are positive, the people are sent to Lehrter Strasse. From all over the city, often on foot because there is no transportation for them. There is only one quarantine station for the homeless in Berlin.
36 places in quarantine for the homeless
There they get a room in house B, a room with a bed and a private bathroom, but without a television or other distraction. Or a bed in the communal quarantine above the ambulance. Doctors take care of those who are sick. There are 36 places that have been almost completely occupied for two weeks. “And winter has only just begun,” says Sarah Klaes. A man is waiting in the courtyard with two travel bags, his PCR test was positive.
Lukas Murajda gets back in the car when he has delivered the syringes. It is almost eight o’clock, he has to bring the company car back to the office, from there he will drive home. His wife and daughter are waiting for him, as they have been on many evenings in the past 20 months.
In the car, he tells about his father, who almost died of Corona in Slovakia a year ago. The vaccination didn’t exist then. Now his parents have become infected again, but when they were vaccinated they hardly felt anything of the disease.
He explains that in the case of the coronavirus, vaccinations will never prevent any infection, but that the course of the disease will be mitigated so that vaccinations and boosters are the way out of the crisis. Long could have been. That is why he plans vaccination campaigns, vaccinate himself. You can vaccinate many more people if you go to them and talk to them, he is convinced of that.
Is the fourth wave the toughest?
“The fourth wave is the saddest,” says Lukas Murajda, and drives into the night.
.