Tests also irrelevant – color doesn’t matter: Corona traffic lights are now a curiosity

How to map the corona risk in the country is actually quite clear from the Covid 19 Measures Act and is not difficult to find, since the relevant parameters are already in paragraph 1.

There you can read about the criteria on which the evaluation of the epidemiological situation in particular should take place. Reported are transmissibility, cluster analysis, source cases identified, test and positivity rate, immunization coverage, virus variants, regional specifics and health care resources.

Share of older infected persons also not relevant for staining
After all, this last point is still and almost exclusively used in coloring. The other parameters used to be relevant to the responsible committee, which consists of representatives of the federal states and the government, as well as experts, but have been dissolved over time. According to information from Vienna, there have now been two-digit calculation changes.

The most famous was last winter, when the limits in the omicron wave were simply drastically lowered, as a color other than red seemed out of reach for months. In June, there was another major change that did not include more testing or asymptomatic cases. At that time, the so-called risk number still determined which color was awarded.

Case numbers have little influence
The score has been around for about a month now. Was the risk number 100, it is now ten, which should not be exceeded if you do not want to end up in the red zone. This score is for the most part based on hospital occupancy, the second important factor being staff shortages, with understaffing – not caused by illness – in many countries not playing a role. The number of cases only plays a role insofar as the trend towards a minimum share is in any case taken into account for the score. Wastewater monitoring is also assigned a small role in the calculation.

This means that the risk assessment is de facto based almost exclusively on the situation in the hospitals. It doesn’t matter how many cases a federal state has, as long as care is available. If, for example, the high number of cases and the accompanying staff shortages forced kindergartens to close or the garbage collection stopped working as usual, it wouldn’t matter to the traffic light as long as there were enough hospital beds and staff. before.

Upper Austria: Highest Incidence, Third Lowest Test Rate
This calculation method then yields a number of things that seem rather bizarre. As one of only two countries in the medium-risk yellow area, Upper Austria is the country with the highest incidence and third-lowest testing rate, indicating a fairly high number of unreported cases. The second state, with Vorarlberg, is the one that shows the most unfavorable trend among the over-65s who are particularly at risk of Covid. However, this is not relevant for the colour, as this factor is also reflected in the Commission working paper, but is not used for the colour. Both countries benefit from the low occupancy rate in hospitals.

The fact that the number of infections hardly plays a role in the assessment has long been justified by the Commission with the small number of tests, which means that the reality of the contamination process can no longer be mapped in this way. The disappearance of this factor is unfavorable for those countries where testing is still quite eager, so the number of unreported cases is likely to be lower – these are the “red” Vienna and the “orange” Burgenland.

The consolation for the countries that do poorly at traffic lights is that color doesn’t really matter. Because the original idea of ​​taking regional measures based on this risk profile was de facto rejected by politicians before the first traffic lights went on in September 2020.