Medical Care

All 876 beds certified by the Swiss Society for Intensive Medicine (SGI) for adults and thus recognized as intensive care beds in Switzerland are now occupied in the course of Covid-19 treatment - with this statement, the Society appealed on Tuesday to the public's sense of responsibility

Patients should consider whether they would like to have life-prolonging measures in the event of a serious illness as "this will help their own relatives as well as the teams of intensive care units in the decision-making process, so that treatment can take place in the best possible way and according to the individual patient's will,".

Switzerland has also updated its triage guidelines in order to assist medical professionals with the decision which patients to treat.

The chief of Switzerland's Covid-19 taskforce, Martin Ackermann, has told reports that "We estimate that the capacity limit in intensive care in hospitals will be reached between November 5-18 if nothing changes from the current situation". Previously a new record of 6,634 Covid-19 cases had been recorded.

A woman in Germany died during a ransomware attack on the Düsseldorf University Hospital, in what may be the first death directly linked to a cyberattack on a hospital. The hospital couldn’t accept emergency patients because of the attack, and the woman was sent to a health care facility around 20 miles away.

It could be the first death directly linked to a cybersecurity attack.