Instead of the previous three, the Ministry of Health wants to publish only a uniform number of new daily corona infections from today, Tuesday. In the current phase of the pandemic, observing long-term trends is more important than short-term daily changes, according to the ministry. A uniform ratio per day is sufficient for this. This is to be done by the Food Health and Safety Agency (AGES) from Tuesday.
The existence of different data sources had repeatedly created confusion, especially in the initial phase of the pandemic. Until recently, three partially different values were published for new infections and deaths: the numbers reported by the state and federal crisis management team (SKKM), the data recorded in the Epidemiological Reporting System (EMS), and the EMS numbers adjusted by AGES during the day.
No more morning reports
In the future, the crisis management team will no longer report the data and the EMS figures will only be published in the corrected version by AGES. This means that the infection and death statistics will be standardized, but will be available a little later than before, which is 2pm on the AGES homepage. The morning reports of SKKM and EMS will be canceled. “The move implements the Court of Auditors’ criticism of the previous corona data management,” a Health Ministry broadcast said Monday. According to information, the total number of infections will be approximately 18,000 lower than previously shown on the AGES website (5,003,286).
It should be noted, however, that official statistics show the infection process less and less reliably as federal and state governments have significantly reduced the number of tests performed. Almost two million PCR tests were performed in August 2021 (of which 1.5% were positive). This year, despite significantly higher incidences, there were only 634,000 tests (nearly ten percent of which were positive). Complexity researcher Peter Klimek then warned in August that EMS numbers are unlikely to be significant and that the number of unreported cases is likely to be well above official infection numbers.
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