First it was the flood of case numbers, now it’s the computer software: The Munich-Land health department hasn’t been able to get a current report of coherent corona data for weeks – and is being scorned and ridiculed for it. Sometimes it’s Christmas, sometimes New Year’s or vacation, other times it’s already five minutes after 2 p.m. and therefore too late for the statistics, scoffs an SZ reader. Anyone who reports high corona numbers only has problems – “relaxations are then difficult to sell”.
In the district office, which is responsible for the health department, such assumptions are rejected. “The data on new infections in the Munich district transmitted daily by the health department in the Munich district office cannot currently be imported to the State Office for Health and Food Safety (LGL) or the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) due to an error in the software used for transmission,” reads the somewhat cumbersome justification for the incorrect figures for days. The result: The seven-day incidence reported by the RKI for the district of Munich is therefore “currently far too low”, according to the brief admission.
The RKI dashboard showed an incidence of 934.6 in the district on Monday morning – the lowest value in almost a month. For the weekend, the RKI had given values of 1064.4 (Sunday) and 1288.6 (Saturday) – these were also far too low. Only on Friday was the incidence for Thursday revised upwards from the initially reported value of 1589.5 to 1767.3. It’s been like this for weeks: The numbers published by the RKI in the morning are corrected the following day – always upwards. The peak values were at the 2000 mark.
In the district office, the responsibility for the incorrect figures is not seen by the health department. The recording and processing of daily new infections by the health department is not affected by the current software problems. “Backlogs that have existed so far have been processed, and all reports from the last few days have been recorded promptly and completely,” said authority spokeswoman Franziska Herr.
According to the district office, the number of cases is transmitted from the health department to the RKI in two steps: First, new reports and case changes are entered into the Sormas computer program, which the authorities have been using since last year, and then the data is transmitted via the Survnet program. From there they are sent to the State Office for Health and Food Safety (LGL) and the RKI. According to the district office, there is currently a technical problem with this second step. Since Saturday, “despite the timely and complete initiation of the data transfer by the health department”, there has been no export of the data to LGL and RKI. “Further manual attempts are currently leading to error messages from the system,” says Franziska Herr. Already on Friday only part of the available data was transferred.
Other health authorities are also complaining about problems with the Corona reporting software. However, with the exception of the Munich Health Department, the authorities in the greater Munich area seem to be getting along. On Monday, the RKI gave incidence values of 1606.8 to 2142.9 for Munich and the other surrounding districts, and 1708.6 for the city of Munich. Experience has shown that the value for Munich-Land should be somewhere in this range. Because of the incomplete reporting, other data is also incorrect: According to the RKI, almost 19 percent of all residents in Munich have now been infected with the corona virus, but allegedly only a good 16 percent in the Munich district. In some neighboring counties, every fifth person has already been infected.
The district office assures that the health department is doing “everything to ensure that the number of cases for the district of Munich can be reported correctly again as soon as possible”. The RKI, the LGL and the technical managers of the two softwares used were urged to rectify the technical problems immediately – but so far without success. Irrespective of this, the health department “continues to keep an eye on the infection process in the Munich district on a daily basis”.