After more than three years, the Ministry of Health wants to largely stop publishing the corona data on a daily basis. The ministry is currently still publishing daily how many people in Austria have contracted Covid-19 or died after an infection. It expires on July 1. As a replacement, a new dashboard with data on serious respiratory diseases will be introduced from August.
The end of the daily corona balance is justified by the fact that Covid-19 was removed from the list of notifiable diseases at the end of June. The files published online currently contain more than 100,000 lines of data for about 1,200 days of the corona pandemic in Austria. It was initially unclear whether this historical data would also be deleted when daily updates stopped, or whether it would still be available online.
Dashboard in time for flu season
To replace the corona statistics, the Ministry of Health publishes figures on serious respiratory diseases in Austria and the nine federal states. Specifically, from August – so before the start of the flu season – the number of people with a severe respiratory infection (“SARI”) who are admitted to hospital treatment or discharged from hospital must be posted online every week. The ministry wants to publish the data broken down by federal state, age group and gender, as well as by intensive care and regular wards.
“This gives us a better overview of the disease burden of all respiratory infections in hospitals, not just severe cases of COVID-19,” said Health Minister Johannes Rauch. The importance of a comprehensive overview of these infections became apparent last winter. It is also published how many people are vaccinated against the disease. But here too, Social Security plans to switch from a daily to a weekly balance from August.
Data on measles is not regularly released
No changes are planned for notifiable diseases such as measles. The contamination figures may only be published on the AGES homepage in the event of larger outbreaks. However, the ministry has announced improvements in the wastewater measurement data. Certain conclusions can also be drawn from this about the course of the infection in the future. According to the ministry, AGES will continue to publish the results of its corona variant monitoring.
Source: Krone
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