Before Closure Decision: Federal States Should Have “Beautiful” Corona Numbers – Coronavirus Vienna

Again there is enthusiasm for the infection figures from the authorities. According to a report published Tuesday in the free newspaper “Heute”, shortly before the planned changes to the shutdown, the Health Ministry asked the federal states to submit the much lower values ​​of the electronic laboratory reporting system (EMS) . According to the report, for example, there are currently not 200 deaths in the EMS, but countries already know about them.

At least from Burgenland, this request from the ministry to the APA was confirmed, but was not implemented by the state authorities. Burgenland was also instructed to pass on the EMS numbers, according to the state’s coronavirus coordination staff. But it will continue to forward the officially confirmed figures it obtains from district authorities, he told the APA. Current figures on development across Austria were not yet available at 2pm, technical problems were listed as the cause on the home page of the Ministry of Health. The Department of Health’s response to an APA inquiry about the “Today” report was pending.

According to the ministry, the objective is to clean the data related to duplicate reports or incorrect entries, which has been implemented for several weeks with the Agency for Health and Food Safety (AGES), to avoid future differences in the figures with a collection time uniform. In early October AGES took over the dashboard and only used the EMS lab diagnostic date. The figures prepared by AGES will now be offered to federal states as a service, including reports to EMS from midnight to midnight the day before.

On Tuesday, NEOS harshly criticized the Health Ministry’s request to federal states to transmit much lower values ​​from the laboratories’ electronic reporting system (EMS). “With this behavior the minister is endangering the confidence of citizens,” NEOS health spokesman Gerald Loacker said in a broadcast.

Large sectors of the population would doubt the meaning of the government’s measures anyway, according to the pink deputy. So it is even worse when Health Minister Rudolf Anschober (Greens) starts “playing with the numbers”, just the day before the relaxation measures are announced. People should be able to trust the federal government to make its decisions “on the basis of valid figures.” There should be no speculation about how high the number of new infections really is, and there should be absolutely no solution to reality, “says Loacker.

The EMS is filled by district authorities and laboratories. At the same time, the Ministry of the Interior collects figures as part of the coordination of state crisis and disaster management in the Operations and Coordination Center (EKC).