Oliver Kappert, head of the Health Department in Freiburg, in an interview with SWR editor Dirk Starke. What are the tasks before a second corona wave and how are new infections recorded?
The health authorities play a central role in the corona crisis, they manage the disease to a certain extent. Authorities are often the first point of contact for sick people. They provide information and rules of conduct, provide current numbers of infected people and try to track the contacts of infected people.
“We have to investigate every new infection.”
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SWR: You get the feeling that the situation is slowly calming down a bit. Is something like normality returning to you in office?
Kappert: You can’t say that at the moment. We prepare and have a very close look at the infection process. That is just as important at the moment. We in a situation comparable to the beginning of the first wave.
SWR: To what extent?
Kappert: It is again the case that we currently have very small numbers of cases in the Freiburg district and in the Breisgau-Hochschwarzwald district. In this situation, it is really important that we investigate each individual new infection and understand where the person was infected and to whom he or she may have spread this infection. We try to keep an eye on all these people in order to prevent the spread – also among the easing measures that we are currently carrying out again in society.
SWR: How many new infections are there in your area of responsibility? Are the loosenings already noticeable?
Kappert: During these social restraint measures, we actually only had new infections in the family or at home, in the work area, in a professional context or in care situations such as in hospitals or nursing homes. Ultimately, all other areas were in the lockdown. In the meantime, you notice that social life is running again. There are new infections again via private contacts, also in connection with school or kindergarten visits. Wherever life flares up again, it can also be expected that there will be more infections again. But overall, we still had very few new cases. Only one case in the last seven or eight days in Freiburg and the district.
SWR: Let’s look back: when was the first confirmed Corona case in and around Freiburg?
Kappert: That was exactly on February 27th. That was the first confirmed case. And you say something very important: we can only report on confirmed cases. These are the ones in which the laboratory diagnostics turned out to be positive.
“We were warned of what was happening in Alsace.”
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SWR: Do you suspect that there were previously unnoticed cases in our region?
Kappert: So getting the first case would be a special coincidence. But I’m pretty sure we got the very beginning of the wave. We were warned by the events that we had to observe in northern Italy and also in Alsace and were able to prepare ourselves accordingly. We had the test available and were therefore able to see the first cases. We were warned and still had no major events in the population
SWR: But then everything went very quickly. When was the peak of the number of cases reached here in the region?
Kappert: In the beginning we had exponential case growth. It went really quickly until we reached the summit. From April 7th to 8th we had 144 new infections in one day.
SWR: In the meantime, the events have calmed down again. How are the numbers actually determined and how do they get to you?
Kappert: The figures result from the registration data according to the Infection Protection Act. Medical practices and laboratories are obliged to report the cases to us. The cases that we then publish are the laboratory-confirmed cases. That means it has been shown to be Covid 19 disease and not another lung disease or infectious disease. So you really only see those who have been to the doctor and had a positive laboratory test.
“After the lockdown, a diffuse spread of the virus would be alarming.”
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SWR: The restrictions are now gradually being relaxed. There is a limit of 50 newly infected people per 100,000 inhabitants. If this is exceeded in the course of a week, restrictions can arise again. Do you think that makes sense and do you think that could be achieved here?
Kappert: I think it makes sense that we also look at the infection process with this value. Because it shows how violent the infection is in the population and how many cases occur within a week. It makes a difference whether this happens diffusely in the population. So whether the 50 cases happen in such a way that if we ask people where they got infected, we can’t get any more information because they simply don’t know where they got infected. That would be a diffuse spread among the population. You got infected during a chance contact. This is rather alarming for us, because then one would have to think about measures on a larger scale.
However, if these numbers occur – because it affects a business, school, hospital, or facility, or because there was an event – where we can narrow down the group of people, there will be measures that only apply to that business or facility. I do not hope that we will come back to this range again. Because we investigate every new infection and work to ensure that the infection chains break.
SWR: Mr. Kappert, thank you for the interview.
