Purely statistically: Every third person in the Starnberg district will be infected with Corona in 2022

Created: 01/11/2023, 05:00 p.m

In 2022, every third person in the district tested positive for the corona virus.

But you have to look at this statistic in a differentiated way.

© IMAGO/Christian Ohde

The number of cases is low, some are talking about the end of the pandemic.

But the district office remains cautious and keeps contact tracing teams on standby – in case of new mutations.

District – Statistically, every third district citizen was infected with Corona in 2022.

This can be calculated from the annual balance sheet.

48,330 Covid cases were reported to the district office last year, but in reality there were many more.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, 59,261 cases have been registered, so 81 percent of all infections occurred in 2022 - mainly a consequence of the more contagious mutant omicron.

Although Covid-19 is still a notifiable disease, many cases do not appear in the statistics - they are based on PCR or professional rapid tests.

Many infected people are now content with self-tests;

There is no obligation to carry out a PCR test if the rapid test is positive in Bavaria, but there is in other federal states.

However, the district office remains cautious.

Over the course of the year, the number of infections increased almost continuously until March, since then they have been falling with rashes in July and October 2022. Including late reports, the maximum seven-day incidence of 3129 was reached at the end of January, and it was lowest in December - at this time Many rules were lifted at that time, and the number of reported cases fell rapidly.

In 2022, 44 deaths were reported, 31 with Covid-19 and 13 with Covid-19.

It was almost exclusively the elderly.

The fact that many no longer have an "official" test done means that the statistics are falsified.

This also applies to other notifiable diseases.

"If, for example, a person with flu symptoms does not go to the doctor, no influenza or no Covid 19 case will be reported to us," explained district spokeswoman Barbara Beck.

More than 30 staff on duty for contact tracing

And what's coming in 2023?

Nobody knows, but the district office remains armed.

More than 30 employees seconded by the government of Upper Bavaria for contact tracing (which has not been done for individual cases of infection since April 2022) are still on duty, at peak times there were 104 positions.

“The work of the employees continues to be to contact the people whose positive evidence of a SARS-CoV-2 infection is reported to the health department.

The procedure for facilities with vulnerable groups of people such as old people’s and nursing homes or hospitals remains unchanged.

These outbreak events are to be processed as before," says Beck.

At least until the middle of the year, the staff will not be reduced in order to be prepared for any increase in cases or new mutations.

"The pandemic is not over yet," emphasized the spokeswoman.

The employees are currently also restructuring the digitization.

There are also other infectious diseases, especially the flu (influenza), whose case numbers have been rising since October, earlier than in other years.

In the 29 months between April 2020 and September 2022 there were only 57 cases in the district - in the past three months there were 748, 484 of them in December alone (corona cases in December: 643).

And those are just the confirmed infections.