In the latest sign of the scale of the coronavirus pandemic sweeping across Europe, a helicopter started airlifting COVID-19 patients from the Netherlands to an intensive care unit in the German city of Muenster.
As of Thursday, there were 463 COVID-19 patients in Dutch intensive care units.
Flevohospital spokesman Peter Pels said flying patients across an international border was a last resort after other hospitals in the region around Almere said their intensive care units couldn't take them.
At the same time, the country has more than 8,100 intensive care beds free at the moment, with about 21,500 occupied, according to the German Interdisciplinary Association for Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine.
During the first phase of the pandemic, in the last week of March and first two weeks of April, Germany took in a total of 232 intensive care patients from Italy, France and the Netherlands.