Over 100 percent?
RKI reports strange corona vaccination quota for Bremen
Created: 01/08/2022, 05:12 PM
From: Tom Offinger
Corona vaccinations are particularly popular in Bremen.
© Jörg Carstensen / dpa
The German vaccination campaign is back in full swing.
In Bremen in particular, many people get vaccinated against the coronavirus - but the corresponding quota is strange.
Bremen / Munich - Germany has been vaccinated a lot again for a few weeks.
In the course of the looming omicron wave and the increasing number of infections, the Federal Ministry of Health led by Karl Lauterbach to restart the process, which had fallen asleep.
In no federal state does the campaign seem to work better than in Bremen.
Nowhere are the vaccination rates higher for first and second doses, and Bremen is also in the upper third for third-party vaccinations.
Corona in Germany: Bremen surprises with high vaccination percentage
The Robert Koch Institute (RKI) presented the current vaccination quotas of the federal states last Thursday.
The Hanseatic City of Bremen took first place among adults who were vaccinated at least once - curiously, with a value of 100.1 percent
(as of January 6, 2022)
.
This fact is due to a lack of clarity in the transmitted vaccination data, which has been known for a long time, but is only now noticeably reflected. Statistically, vaccinations are not assigned to the patient's home state, but to the state in which the person was vaccinated against the coronavirus.
For example, if commuters from the Lower Saxony area get their vaccination in the Hanseatic city, they count accordingly in the Bremen statistics. The main reason for this curiosity is the difference in the reporting procedure between vaccination centers and medical practices - depending on where a patient received his vaccination, the RKI learns about it in different ways and at the same time receives differently detailed information. A vaccination center transmits various information (such as age, gender, vaccine and place of residence) in a pseudonymized database, where they can be called up by the RKI.
The vaccinating statutory health insurance physicians, on the other hand, transmit their vaccination data using their own tool from the National Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians (KBV).
At the beginning of the vaccination campaign, it was considered that they too would send an extensive data package to the RKI, including the patient's address.
The software provided by the RKI for this purpose was described by a medical officer as a "vaccination obstacle", the planned procedure required a high level of bureaucratic effort.
As a result, it was agreed on a reduced reporting requirement, without the place of residence of the vaccinated people.
Corona in Germany: To what extent do the vaccination numbers differ?
"All data sources only contain the location of the vaccinating bodies," a corresponding letter from the RKI is
quoted in
Spiegel magazine
. With this data transfer, the institute then calculates the quotas in Germany. It is not uncommon for people to be vaccinated in a district where they actually do not live. Therefore, the figures for the city-states of Berlin (adult vaccination rate: 85.9%), Hamburg (91.2%) and Bremen, in particular, could possibly be quite skewed - while the residents stay within the city limits, countless patients from outside the city may come to the cities. As a result, the vaccination rates tend to be too high.
To what extent the numbers differ, nobody can say exactly, even in Bremen there is no clarity in this regard.
At the request of
Spiegel
, the press office informed the Bremen Senator for Health that in the first half of 2021, when cross-border vaccinations between the Hanseatic city and Lower Saxony were still being recorded, almost as many people from Bremen were vaccinated in Lower Saxony as the other way around.
Either way, the people of Bremen seem to have done a lot right in the course of the vaccination campaign.
In Bavaria, the rate of adults who have received at least one vaccination is just 81.6 percent (12th place in a nationwide comparison).
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