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Numbers are no longer updated every hour, but once a day at 2pm
12:56 pm, October 7, 2020
On Tuesday, the Austrian Agency for Health and Food Safety (AGES) will take over control of the Covid-19 panel of the Ministry of Health. What goes with numerous innovations hand to hand. So the numbers are not hourly anymore, but updated once a day at 2pm furthermore, the AGES overview shows significantly more active cases. But not because more illnesses occurred, but because of a delay in reporting recovery.
The “old” board of the Ministry of Social Affairs last showed 9,207 active Covid infections, in the “new” board of AGES there are 11,274. Reason for discrepancy: AGES obtains its figures exclusively from the “Epidemiological Notification System” (EMS). All infections and all deaths appear there. The recoveries, which are decisive for the calculation of active cases, are only reported to EMS with a significant delay. The “old” dashboard, for its part, obtained the number of recoveries from the morning teleconferences of the crisis team in the Ministry of the Interior and, therefore, had more up-to-date data.
Deviation also in case of death
There is another deviation, albeit significantly smaller, in the number of deaths. Here AGES follows the World Health Organization guidelines and counts almost everyone who has died with a Covid-19 infection as “corona deaths” (unless there is a clear alternate cause of death that cannot be associated with COVID disease, p. B. Trauma). For this reason, eleven more deaths are now reported.
The dashboard is now available at https://covid19-dashboard.ages.at. In addition to the modified design and display of the cumulative number of tests, laboratory confirmed, recovered, deceased and active cases, there are other changes. Laboratory confirmed cases of a SARS-CoV-2 infection with a laboratory diagnosis date within the last seven days are given in relation to the day before the day of the report (for Austria, depending on the state and district of the place of residence). The time display is based on the day of the lab diagnosis or the first positive lab report.
A representation of total deaths is possible and according to federal state and district, the temporal representation of deaths by date of death, representation of deaths by age group and sex. Information on available hospital beds is provided for each federal state.
There are also differences in the epidemiological curve. Only the EMS lab diagnostic date is used for AGES dashboard display. Until now, the disease date (possibly prior to the laboratory diagnosis date) or the reporting date (case creation in EMS) was used for visualization.
EMS is a database of the necessary clinical, epidemiological and laboratory data on notifiable diseases in Austria. All Austrian district administrative authorities, state medical directorates, the Federal Ministry of Social Affairs, Health, Care and Consumer Protection and the Agency for Health and Food Safety have access to this database.
In the future, the data will only be updated once a day at 2pm AGES justifies this as precisely as possible. In the case of a 2pm update, it can be assumed that this data is available in EMS and has been verified.
The districts of Vienna are not yet shown individually. According to AGES, due to the high mobility of the population within the federal capital in comparison with the districts of other federal states, a representation by districts is not convenient from the epidemiological point of view.
