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Thursday’s high value is due to late registrations and problems with the reporting system. Researchers are harshly critical of the data.
The number of people infected with the coronavirus rose to a new record on Thursday. According to the Interior Ministry, 9,262 people were added who tested positive for Covid-19.
So far, 181,642 positive results have been obtained in Austria. On Thursday, 3,811 infected people were being treated at a hospital. 546 of the patients were in intensive care units. The numbers by federal state: Burgenland: 194, Carinthia: 399, Lower Austria: 634, Upper Austria: 2554, Salzburg: 798, Styria: 1116, Tyrol: 879, Vorarlberg: 537 and Vienna 2151. These are the numbers sent by the Ministry of the Interior on Thursday afternoon.
Reporting system problems
It is also a new record for the federal capital. But: The high value can be traced back to late reports, according to the Vienna City Crisis Team. The value is only moderately significant, as there have been technical problems with the federal epidemiological reporting system (EMS), in which federal states report crown data, since the weekend.
Therefore, the actual number of new coronavirus cases in 24 hours cannot be read correctly in the statistics released today. According to the crisis team, technical problems affect all federal states. According to Health Minister Rudolf Anschober (Greens) these should now be resolved. The department head was still expecting late registrations for Thursday.
Researcher: Better Data Needed to Make Forecasts
Scientists are calling for a “vastly improved data situation” on the corona infection process. With the currently inadequate data, there is a risk of losing the modeling tool. “This means that we are exposed to the infection process practically blind and we even lose the opportunity to make short-term forecasts”, warn the researchers from the Complexity Science Hub Vienna (CSH) in a “Policy Brief”.
“If, as is the case today, there are massive false reports and late reports from authorities (sometimes for days), it becomes increasingly impossible to describe the current infection situation and that of the recent past, much less forecast the number of future cases, “writes Peter Klimek. and Stefan Thurner of CSH in the analysis published Thursday. They emphasize that it is to make informed decisions like “Close or not?” You need not only an understanding of the dynamics, especially why growth rates fluctuate so strongly, but also a vastly improved database of case numbers and capacities in the healthcare sector.
To arrive at meaningful forecasts, you have to know the exponential growth rate with precision, the researchers emphasize. However, this could be difficult in practice. The 7-day incidence, that is, the number of new infections per week, has changed between minus 10 and plus 25 percent in recent months. The biggest jumps in growth rates were recorded in mid-August, mid-September and late October. “Due to the overall low number of cases in the first breaks in August and September, these were recorded, but hardly associated with demands for new closures,” the analysis says.
The growth was “super exponential”
It was only when the growth rate in calendar week 43 (October 19-25) jumped to 15 percent with a high number of cases that it was predictable for the first time that care in the intensive care area would soon reach its limits of capacity and a new lock would be required. Due to the growth rates in early and mid-October, such a rapid rise would not have been expected if the curve had been truly exponential. “However, the real growth was faster than exponential,” say the researchers, who speak of “super-exponential.” In this case, the growth rate that determines exponential growth is increasing rapidly.
Why there was an increase at week 43 is not yet fully understood, the researchers emphasize. Thurner and Klimek suspect that the massive increase could be related to the simultaneous overload of authorities to register and report cases. Because if cases are no longer registered enough or are identified as infectious too late, very few people could be eliminated from the infection process, which in some cases leads to drastically increased growth rates.
What are the effects of fall and winter?
“Seasonality” could also play a role, say the researchers according to studies, according to which the life span of the virus is particularly long in cold, humid or very dry environments and therefore the possibility that the excreted virus may cause an infection. “This raises fears that it will worsen in colder months,” the analysis said.
Klimek and Thurner see the number of cases and the associated intensive capacities required in the critical area: “The current number of cases must be reduced rapidly; the health system can no longer cope with a further increase in virus activity.” Too much infection is happening “under the radar,” emphasize the researchers, who meanwhile assume that asymptomatically infected people are just as contagious as people with symptoms.
As “urgent recommendations for action”, the complexity researchers name an immediate improvement in the current data situation, the creation of an “effective national digital emergency concept” and the definition of a target scenario. Because even if we manage to drastically reduce the number of cases in the coming weeks, the question arises: “How do we get through the rest of the winter?”
(APA / red.)
