Dhe incidence of new corona infections in Germany has again reached a high. The Robert Koch Institute (RKI) gave the seven-day incidence on Friday morning as 1073.0. On Thursday the value was 1017.4, on Friday last week it was 706.3. The incidence quantifies the number of new infections per 100,000 inhabitants over a period of seven days.
According to data from the health authorities, the number of new infections within 24 hours was 190,148 on Friday – after 203,136 the day before and 140,160 on Friday last week.
As the RKI further announced, citing data from the health authorities, 170 new deaths related to the corona virus were counted on Friday.
regional divergence
There are still large regional differences in the seven-day incidence. In Berlin the incidence is 1829.4 (in Berlin Tempelhof-Schoeneberg at 3192.2). In Saxony (546.4) and Thuringia (402.2) the incidence values are much lower.
Rising hospital admissions
In November, the federal and state governments had defined the so-called hospitalization incidence as the decisive benchmark for tightening the corona measures. This value indicates how many people per 100,000 inhabitants are in the hospital within seven days because of a corona infection. According to the latest RKI report on Thursday, the hospitalization incidence nationwide was 4.64. After a few weeks of stagnation, the value has recently picked up again significantly.
The President of the German Interdisciplinary Association for Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine (DIVI), Gernot Marx, told the Rheinische Post that, in view of the “very high incidences”, he expects “the general number of patients to increase significantly again can and certainly will”. Infection with the omicron variant is often milder than with the delta variant, but: “We’re not talking about a cold here,” emphasized Marx. “There will be serious courses and deaths.”
Almost every third corona test positive
In the most recent weekly report on Thursday, the RKI pointed out that 32 percent of the reported corona tests in Germany last week were positive. In the previous week it was still 24 percent. Due to the “massive” increase in “infection pressure”, there have long been fears that the registered infection numbers do not reflect the actual infection process.
The RKI explained: “Even if every individual case is no longer recorded in the reporting system”, additional indicators allow “a reliable assessment of the overall development”. For the assessment of the situation in the current situation of the pandemic, “the focus is not on recording all infections caused by SARS-CoV-2, but on the development of the number and severity of the diseases”.