Marco Latzer and Pascal Scheiber
Since the end of the summer vacation, the situation in Swiss hospitals has become threatening. Thurgau, for example, has to move seriously ill people to other cantons because their own intensive care units are bursting at the seams (Blick reported).
As there is a lack of qualified staff across Switzerland, capacities in the intensive care units are limited. But: “The return flights from abroad are also a major problem for us. Many patients have already been and are still to be flown in, ”says Thurgau’s health director Urs Martin (42) to Blick. This aggravates the situation in the hospitals even more.
Rega flew 21 times to Pristina in August alone
In the Balkans in particular, many people residing in Switzerland fell ill with Corona so severely during the summer holidays that it is still impossible to return independently. Ambulance jets have been in constant use since then to fly home the seriously ill insured in this country.
On request, Rega does not want to provide any information about its return flights “for reasons of patient protection”. However, Blick was able to unofficially evaluate the flight activities of the three Rega ambulance jets via the Flightradar24 tracking portal.
The result: Rega has flown to the Kosovar capital Pristina 21 times since the beginning of the month alone. Far behind in the Spitaljet ranking are Skopje (North Macedonia, 9 approaches), Belgrade (Serbia) and the two Italian cities of Naples and Brindisi, each with four landings.
Many return patients remain in Kosovo
The Rega evaluation matches the figures from Medicall AG. It organizes return campaigns around the world on behalf of Swiss health insurances. In July and August, the company carried out a total of 55 repatriations of corona patients.
18 return campaigns with planes, helicopters and ambulances took place in Kosovo and North Macedonia. This makes the region a sad leader at Medicall.
Also worrying: At Medicall alone, there are currently 36 corona return transports on the waiting list worldwide. 20 of the patients, i.e. more than half, are in hospitals in Kosovo and North Macedonia!
«We cover half of all health insured persons in Switzerland. Then there are other patients who contact Rega directly. So you can extrapolate our numbers by a factor of around 2.5, ”explains Martin Huser, Medicall Managing Director. Experience has shown that around three quarters of all corona patients who are to be returned come to the intensive care unit.
Dual citizens wait for help in Kosovo hospitals
It is difficult to assess what the local situation will look like. The Kosovar hospital director Valbon Krasniqi (49) only confirms to Blick that dual citizens are currently hospitalized. How many there are and whether there are intensive care patients, he does not know due to a lack of data.
It comes as no surprise that Kosovo stands out as a hotspot. The large Swiss diaspora eagerly used the summer to visit their homeland. Mostly in planes full to the brim and packed buses.
Kosovo also hit the headlines as a Balkan Ballermann, because there was particularly excessive and unrestrained partying. Because the government had practically lifted all corona restrictions before the summer vacation. Fake PCR tests are also said to be in circulation.
Kosovo is being overwhelmed by the corona wave
The consequence: Because of the rampant Delta variant, the number of infections exploded, especially in August. The main problem, however, is that only a little over eleven percent of all Kosovars have been vaccinated twice against the virus. In Switzerland, too, an above-average number of people from the Balkans have not been vaccinated.
In 40 percent of the corona patients hospitalized in this country, the place of infection could be clearly determined. Of these, 80 percent had spent their holidays in southern Europe, as Corona Task Force Vice Urs Karrer announced last week.