Enlarge image
Corona rapid test in Munich
Photo: Wolfgang Maria Weber / IMAGO
A gigantic amount of data was collected during the corona pandemic.
Which incidence prevailed in which district, how often people had themselves tested or how busy the laboratories were – there were statistics and figures for practically all these questions.
Many of these were available to anyone at any time.
Many protective measures are now falling because the threat to the entire population is currently considered to be relatively low.
But dealing with it loosely makes it more difficult to monitor the virus: not only the volume, but also the resilience and timeliness of the data could decrease.
Observers are already seeing a step backwards: The monitoring and reporting of virus movements are already slowing down, due to political decisions, the journal "Nature" recently summarized.
The consequences could be disastrous, it said.
The fact that surveillance is being shut down in many places is comparable to stopping antibiotics when the symptoms first subside and increase the risk of a bad relapse.
In Germany, the first federal states have stopped transmitting case numbers to the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) on weekends.
One consequence: According to the RKI, the informative value of the new infections reported on a daily basis is even more limited at the beginning of the week than was the case anyway due to delayed data transmissions on Saturdays and Sundays.
The number of PCR tests carried out should also only appear every 14 days instead of weekly, as announced by the RKI and the ALM laboratory association.
The Bremen epidemiologist Hajo Zeeb is concerned about the declining quality and quantity of information: In any case, it will be essential in the near future to have good figures on the spread of the virus and, above all, on the possible occurrence of new variants.
"For the management in hospitals, for example, up to the hotspot definition, not less, but more, and even more important: better data is needed," he told the German Press Agency.
Even the most diligent data collectors go back
A similar trend can also be observed in other countries, some of which collected better data than Germany during the pandemic.
The British government had announced, for example, that public funding for various corona surveillance studies and data collections would expire in the spring.
From the beginning of April, free access to rapid tests should only be granted to particularly vulnerable groups.
British health experts criticized the project.
"Ending data collection early is false austerity and may need to be reversed to deal with future corona waves," said public health expert Azeem Majeed of London's Imperial College recently.
In an article in the British Medical Journal, scientists and medical professionals described the strategy as a "walk in the dark."
Denmark was once considered a model country for corona data collection, more testing was done there than almost anywhere else.
Practically all restrictions have been lifted there since the beginning of February, and Covid-19 is no longer considered a socially critical disease.
The test capacities have been reduced accordingly: at the beginning of 2022 – with around six million inhabitants – 1.3 to 1.6 million PCR tests were carried out weekly, in the past week it was just over 100,000.
The Danish health administration advises only to be tested if there is a special health reason.
"Health policy decisions require well-founded, reliable figures," says Eugen Brysch, the head of the German Foundation for Patient Protection, with a view to the situation in Germany.
"But the truth is that the corona measures are often not based on science, but are increasingly politically and ideologically motivated." Even after more than two years, the federal and state governments had not managed to implement efficient corona monitoring.
There was still a lack of reliable and up-to-date data for hospitals.
You need such information – also to justify hotspot regulations.
Epidemiologist Zeeb emphasizes which data is still needed very promptly - from his point of view, this includes the numbers on hospital admissions and intensive care bed occupancy.
He also points out that the same high level of testing cannot be maintained for years: good approaches to surveillance at selected sites are needed to complement test results from symptomatic patients.
In perspective, the wastewater in Germany could reveal even more about Corona than before.
Advantages of such monitoring: Pathogens can be detected in the waste water through the excretions of infected people, independently of tests and symptoms of the disease.
A pilot operation at 20 locations in Germany started in stages from February to April.
Samples are taken twice a week and examined for various biomarkers.
"The first results at individual locations could be available as early as autumn 2022," said the RKI when asked.
However, Germany also lagged behind in the introduction of a nationwide network with the most important waste water locations.
Countries such as Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland had previously collected such data from sewage treatment plants.
dpa/joe
