Doctor Suspected of Killing COVID Patients in ICU

A senior doctor in Germany is being held on suspicion of killing two coronavirus patients by injection. The patients—men 47 and 50—had severe cases, police in Essen said, and were in intensive care, Reuters reports. Police said the 44-year-old doctor, who began working at University Hospital around the beginning of the pandemic, admitted giving one of the patients an injection, saying he didn't want the man and his family to suffer anymore. He was arrested Wednesday. Germany permits patients to ask for help if they want to end their lives, but there was no information about whether that happened in these cases.

The number of coronavirus patients in Germany's intensive care units hit a record 3,615 on Friday, up from 267 two months ago, per CNN. "The number of severe cases in intensive patients is still rising," a spokesman for Chancellor Angela Merkel said. And the intensive care chief at a Potsdam hospital said, "We are not at the tip of the wave now, at least as far as I see." As of Friday, Germany had patients in 22,066 intensive care beds, including non-COVID cases, with 6,107 beds vacant. But that surplus will disappear if infection rates don't slow down, officials said. A chief nurse in Potsdam said many COVID-19 patients arrive at the emergency room and are soon moved to ICU, "because patients deteriorate very quickly." (More Germany stories.)