Virologist: It is not feasible to only protect risk groups
From the point of view of the Frankfurt virologist Sandra Ciesek, protecting only risk groups from the coronavirus is neither possible nor feasible. If you take the Robert Koch Institute’s list of relevant previous illnesses as a basis, that would be 21.9 million people, said Ciesek in the NDR podcast “Coronavirus-Update“on Tuesday. Over a quarter of Germans had at least one of the pre-existing illnesses considered and thus a risk of a particularly severe course.
The risk group did not only include old people in nursing homes, “that is simply not the case,” said Ciesek. A third – 7.3 million people – of these almost 22 million are under 60 years of age. The director of the Institute for Medical Virology at the Frankfurt University Hospital therefore believes the strategy of only protecting the risk groups has not been well thought out: “I imagine it will be extremely difficult to do this.”
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