“People don’t always understand our humor,” says Müller. “When things start to get bad, the joking stops.” From that point of view, the worst hasn’t yet arrived. But that situation won’t last long. The Dresden University Hospital is no longer taking patients, and some will soon be sent to Leipzig. What then?
Outside, Ver.di is still demonstrating for more money to be made available for nursing. Knauth says: “A much bigger problem is the shift work.” When he emerges on Monday morning from the night shift, his work schedule notes that he has Monday “off” even though he has already worked for six hours that day. And then there are the rotations: Every few days, nurses are moved from the early shift to the late shift, and then to the overnight shift. When you’re young, says Knauth, you can deal with it. But then, he says, “it gets harder, and especially once you have a family.” Knauth is 37 and has two children.
Knauth believes the problem is that nurses haven’t adequately joined forces in a labor union. “The largest group of health-care workers has the smallest lobby,” he says. The unions, he adds, are small and fragmented, adding that nurses have never really learned to stand up for themselves. Knauth is not a member of a union either.
In the office of Christoph Josten, the university hospital’s medical director, a small globe sits on the shelf among the medical books. He warned way back at the beginning of November of the approaching “tsunami wave.”
He says that when it comes to nurses, his hospital is in relatively good shape. Rents are affordable in Leipzig, there are plenty of young people in the city and lots of training programs available. “We know that the situation is quite different elsewhere,” Josten says.
“A university hospital,” Josten says, “is like a giant ship, and the nurses are its engine room. If they are exhausted, you can’t do anything anymore and the ship grinds to a halt.” He says the hospital’s board decided in mid-September to cut back on activities and cancel non-essential operations to give staff a bit of a break, eliminate overtime and give people a chance to go on vacation. “Our primary goal was to give our staff a chance to relax and gather their strength,” Josten says. And then the fourth wave arrived.
There is an important question that doctors are unable to answer, says Josten, one to which only society can provide a response. “To what degree can we tolerate a situation in which many patients must go without treatment because a specific group is blocking vital resources?” He means the group of those who refuse to be vaccinated.
Wednesday morning, 5:45 a.m., 20 patients in the station
The Day of Repentance and Prayer, on Nov. 17 this year, is a holiday in Saxony. Three-hundred meters away from the hospital entrance is a group of 10 men, a long night of partying behind them. They are drinking and smoking, with not a mask in sight.
Inside, at the intensive care station, Anke Schrötter, 44, is furious. One of her patients in room B1129 is responsive. The man told her that he didn’t get vaccinated, saying the vaccines can’t be trusted and people also die from the flu. His wife, who works in geriatric care, also has also chosen to forego vaccination. “We provide equal care to the unvaccinated and the vaccinated,” Schrötter says. But hearing such things, she says, hardens you. Now, though, Schrötter has to move on and rotate a patient. She starts putting on her protective gear.