Corona: Switzerland’s problem with data

How Delayed and Missing Data Make Fighting Corona Difficult in Switzerland

Benno Lichtsteiner / Keystone-SDA

Data that is received too late or missing at all makes it difficult to fight the crown pandemic in Switzerland. The current figures would have been helpful, especially for a strategy at the start of the second wave in the fall. But the will and coordination are lacking.

“Figures on hospitalizations should be interpreted with caution due to gaps in reporting and delays in reporting.” in your daily status report connected to the figures of daily hospital deliveries. It’s also easy to see how late some of the information is received.

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This delay has been impressively evident in the last three months: In the first four weeks of October, when the situation in Switzerland deteriorated dramatically, the FOPH reported only half of the hospital admissions per week of those that were officially confirmed later.

In early November, the reporting situation changed: Since then, the number of BAG hospitalizations has exceeded actual hospital admissions published later by as much as 200 per week in some cases.

For deaths, the actual figures in October and November per week were up to 100 percent higher than the cases reported by the BAG. Since the beginning of December, the BAG numbers have returned to the fore.

The long wait

For many Swiss, the figures published daily in all Swiss media are an important indicator of the course of the pandemic. However, the delay is not primarily a problem for the population but primarily for decision makers.

That doesn’t mean that “core parameters such as the number of views cannot be reliably estimated from currently available data,” says an expert who has been entrusted with the matter and who only wants to comment anonymously on request. “But if we had more data, especially in real time, we would also have more information about the current course of the pandemic,”

Because it is the special feature of the virus that infections are only detected about five days later and the virus usually only reacts to measures taken with some delay. And then all of a sudden it becomes a problem when doctors and hospitals don’t handle so-called faster and better reports.

24 hour instruction

Theoretically, everything would actually be regulated: “Doctors and hospitals are instructed to report information on hospitalized people to the BAG based on clinical findings within 24 hours,” the BAG wrote in response to a request from the Keystone-SDA news agency.

Normally, clinical findings should be transmitted electronically. “To ensure integrity”, it is also possible to do so by post or fax.

Unanswered

A good data situation is “central” in the fight against the pandemic, according to the Health Directors Conference (GDK) upon request. And she is also aware of the problem. For this reason, the general secretary of the GDK and the director of the BAG wrote a letter to the cantonal directors of health in mid-November.

In it, they called on the cantons to ask their hospitals to report to the FOPH the required clinical reports on hospitalizations within the required period. A response is still pending.

No contact tracing data

As unpleasant for researchers as the delay in reporting is that contact tracing data from the cantons is not available to them. However, these would be particularly useful in complementing the findings on infection sites from international studies with real-time Swiss data.

This could have supported the strategies of policy and authorities in the early fall before the second wave so that specific measures could be taken later. However, at the present time, “the acute epidemiological situation in Switzerland and the overload of the health system only allowed strict measures to reduce contact,” says ETH professor and member of the scientific working group Sebastian Bonhoeffer on request.

In his opinion, the problem is that the data is not recorded and shared uniformly. Immediately after the first wave, the researchers called for a national system. But the cantons could not agree on this and instead developed a joint questionnaire as a minimal solution.

But this data exchange does not work comprehensively either. For Bonhoeffer, therefore, it is “unfavorable” that there has not been a faster reaction in this regard, “because Switzerland was greatly affected by the lack of digitization at the beginning of the crisis.” (sda)