In the last 20 years the standard "joke" (ha ha, only true) about the universal health system is that you need to be in good health in order to have enough energy to fight for your right to get help. The health care debt was an all time high at the start of the pandemic, and has since sky rocketed.
The faults are many. Poor wages has create many empty seats at the university programs. A lack of available personal has created a demand for labour hire employees, creating a system where many are moving to those in order to get pay rises, furthering increasing the cut that the middle men takes. An sharp increase in populations has increased demand, without any corresponding supply or funding. Employees has had an increase in paper work, with technology solutions that has caused additional work rather than optimized the work flow. Those same technology solutions has also been expensive to the point of corruptions, with some deals being actually corruptions that gone to court.
The situation is so bad that my own health clinic is sending every patient that calls them on non-mondays to the emergency department, as they are by law required to redirect the patient somewhere and all their own doctors are booked for the rest of the week, a pattern that been going on every week for the last year. Vacations has been removed as an emergency decision at many hospitals, and in one case the "compensation" for lost summer vacation was a fruit basket.
The expected time frame to raise the standard and actually train enough workers, as calculated by researchers a few years ago, was (if I remember right) somewhere around 10-20 years into the future. One pre-panedmic solution was to encourage skilled immigration directly from hospitals of nearby countries, a fix that obviously is not going to work now. If Germany is anywhere similar, then the blame isn't disinformation. It is systemic problem that has existed for decades and is now being pushed to over the edge.
It's really a shockingly well kept secret, especially to the outside world. Much like the utterly dysfunctional rail system.
Before the pandemic, I would have said that the country's healthcare system was about a decade away from resource-crisis. Now, it may have already started. I'm terrified of ending up in a hospital, even if there's no covid-wave ongoing. I do not want my life in the hands of the overworked traumatized remnants.
The way this country treats healthcare workers is shameful.
Media and politics are way more responsible than the craziest idiot.
Knowing that the vaccine doesn't prevent the person from getting and spreading covid. Knowing that the point of the vaccine is to prevent serious illness in the person receiving it. I struggle to understand why you would not even question how important they are in that setting unless you are worried they have dropped that extra safety component.
It's part of the reason that bed capacity has been so difficult to keep constant or increase.
Vaccines reduce the risk of spreading the virus. People who are vaccinated are less likely to get seriously ill. This absolutely doesn't mean you won't die if you are vaccinated. Think seat belts in car accidents. It is all about reducing risk. On mass, at population levels, this means ICU have capacity to take in other seriously ill people. If ICUs are full and there is a plane crash or whatever where many people are seriously injured we are screwed.
You could make the point that increasing the spread when everyone is protected is fine but that allows for increased mutations.
Except for all of 2020.
and this?
https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/flu-vaccine-requir...
But it seems strange to realize that people don't want to do a job where you have to watch people die like flies over the course of two to three weeks. No money in the world makes that acceptable for many.
With the availability of the vaccines (at least in the developed world) this has become a pandemic of the uninformed know-it-alls ("Querdenker" = Crooked thinker, as they are call here). If you work on an ICU to rescue people that tell you that this is all a scam by the Pharma-Industrial Complex, you would want to quit.
It is not the media's fault where we are now, nor are the politicians (entirely) to blame. At least half the blame should be frankly put on social media disinformation and the usual tabloid press (Springer/Bild) that fabricate Fox-News style lies.