15. Migrants filling up intensive care in German hospitals during COVID-19 pandemic. Fake or not?
“The price of immigration: migrants filling up intensive care in German hospitals”, read the headline of an article on the Hungarian public service media Hirado in March 2020. The piece is about Germany, where a private conversation between doctors made its way to the media. In the conversation, Lothar Wieler, the president of the German Robert Koch Institute (RKI) for infectious diseases claimed that the vast majority (up to 90%) of severe COVID-19 patients have an immigrant background when talking to the chief physicians of several hospitals in Germany. The original report was published in the tabloid newspaper Bild. According to the Berlin newspaper Tagesspiegel, a large number of men from Arab countries or Turkey were being treated in hospitals in the capital. There have allegedly been many disputes with family members who wanted to visit the wards and did not want to abide by COVID regulations.
This was also published with sensational title in the British Daily Mail
HOW CAN WE VERIFY THIS?
It is important to note that RKI has published no official figures on infection or death rates among different ethnic groups in Germany, and investigative journalists from CORRECTIV confirmed through fact checking that one cannot conclusively say that the majority of intensive care unit patients are migrants or Muslims, because in Germany there are no such data surveys. The topic and subsequent articles, published in multiple countries, are based on a “private, informal exchange”, according to Wieler himself. At a press conference a few days later, Wieler added that “statements by individual doctors were being extrapolated to apply to the entire country.”
Jens Thurau for Deutsche Welle: “Pandemic a challenge for migrants” “Around a quarter of the German population has an immigration background, 13% of whom do not have a German passport. The pandemic has been challenging for everyone, but particularly for people who do not speak or understand German well, and especially for the many refugees who arrived in the country since 2015. They often live in cramped conditions and may have limited access to public information, for example, about travel restrictions and the spread of the pandemic across the country. For these reasons, it would make sense if the proportion of those infected among migrant communities is higher than in the rest of society. But reliable figures for the whole country do not exist.”
WHAT ARE OTHER SOURCES SAYING?
In the report “Coronavirus COVID-19 outbreak in the EU Fundamental Rights Implications in Germany”, Fundamental Rights Agency points at the raise of xenophobia and racism during the COVID-19 outbreak, especially towards migrants and asylum seekers and people with Asian background.
There is also a report “The impact of disinformation campaigns about migrants and minority groups in the EU” by the expert group for the European Parliament that recognizes the same concern. Keeping in mind that this incident happened in the very beginning of the COVID-19 crises, this story has been debunked several times over, but it does showcase the severity of the biases that exist towards migrant population.
FAKE OR NOT?
This news is fake and xenophobic towards the migrants.
