Today's corona news in 60 seconds
+++Numbers and intensive care patients up +++ Artificial Lüften is better than no Lüften +++ The latest BER embarrassment +++ The stats
Berlin-Every weekday at 11am come to the Berliner Zeitung English Edition for the latest corona/Covid-19 news at a glance.
🚥 First, the official corona stats for Berlin (tallied Monday, 2 November)
New cases in one day: +1,513 (Tuesday +713)
Total number of corona deaths: 265 (+4)
🟢 R number: 0.92 (1.09 Monday)
🔴 New infections per week: 178.1 / 100,000 inhabitants (166.3 Monday)
🟡 Share of Berlin ICUs occupied by Covid-19 patients: 17.1 per cent (13.7 per cent Monday)
Source: Berlin's coronavirus status page
The lowdown...
Numbers and intensive care patients up
The light for intensive-care bed usage in hospitals leapt to yellow for the first time ever on Monday as a record new 1,513 cases of corona were reported in Berlin. Hospital officials warned that intensive care beds could become scarce if new cases continue to grow - 218 Covid-19 patients in Berlin are being treated in intensive care units, double as many as on 22 October. About 130 beds remain available and an additional 459 could be made available, if necessary.
Charité Hospital officials said they have already begun postponing elective surgeries to free up personnel to treat corona patients and non-corona patients in intensive care are being moved to other hospitals to concentrate corona patients in individual institutions.
Artificial Lüften is better than no Lüften
Berlin is spending €4.5m to buy 1,200 mobile air filtering devices to reduce aerosols in poorly ventilated classrooms and daycare facilities. Politicians have already doled out€1m on CO2 monitoring devices that can help teachers and minders know when to air out rooms to keep potential airborne coronaviruses at a minimum.
The latest BER embarrassment - Mayor in self-quarantine
Berlin Mayor Michael Müller (SPD) is self-quarantining after his counterpart in Brandenburg, Dietmar Woidke (SPD) tested positive for the coronavirus. The two state government heads met this weekend for the opening of the BER airport. The positive test lead to Covid-19 scares for German traffic minister Andreas Scheuer (CSU), who took a quick test that came back negative, as well as Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr (LHA), who cancelled a planned return to Berlin just in case. No word on his test results. Müller's results are expected any minute.
In case you missed it...
One-third of the staff here at the English Edition caught coronavirus and wrote about her mostly symptom-free experience. Catch up here.
That's all for now folks. Stay safe!
Yours,
The Berliner Zeitung English team
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