Image: GEORG HOCHMUTH (APA)
This expires on July 1st. As a replacement, there will be a new dashboard with data on severe respiratory diseases 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 on the Internet currently contain several 100,000 lines of data covering around 1,200 days of the corona pandemic in Austria. It was initially unclear whether this historical data would also be deleted when the daily updates ended, or whether they would still be available online.
As a replacement for the corona statistics, the Ministry of Health announces figures on severe respiratory diseases in Austria and the nine federal states. Specifically, from August – i.e. before the start of the flu season – the number of people with a severe respiratory infection (“SARI”) admitted to hospital treatment or discharged from the hospital should 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 normal wards.
“This gives us a better overview of the burden of disease from all respiratory infections in hospitals, not just severe COVID-19 cases,” said Health Minister Johannes Rauch in a broadcast. The importance of a comprehensive overview of these infections was seen last winter. It is also published how many people get vaccinated against the disease. However, the social security system is also planning to switch from a daily to a weekly balance sheet here as of August.
No changes are planned for notifiable diseases such as measles. Here, the infection numbers should continue to be published only in the case of larger outbreaks on the AGES homepage and not as open data. However, the ministry has announced improvements in the wastewater measurement data. These also allow certain conclusions to be drawn about the course of infection in the future. According to the ministry, AGES will continue to make the results of its corona variant monitoring publicly available.
Source: Nachrichten
