How high is the vaccination rate in Germany really? Recently, a report about a possible under-reporting of vaccinations caused a stir. Now the RKI is defending itself.
Berlin – The Robert Koch Institute (RKI) rejects responsibility for apparently too low values in the official corona vaccination statistics. “The RKI can only publish the vaccination data that has been transmitted to it accordingly,” said President Lothar Wieler, according to a statement on Wednesday.
Too low a coverage is “not an error and not a neglect of the RKI”, but goes back to failure to report some vaccinating agencies, it said. When determining the vaccination quota, one has to rely on the so-called digital vaccination quota monitoring (DIM), writes the RKI. The application and reliability of this reporting system lies “exclusively in the hands of the vaccinating bodies (vaccination centers, vaccination teams, hospitals, medical practices, company doctors)”.
A week ago, the RKI wrote in a report that among other things, more people are probably vaccinated than the official data suggest. This is indicated, among other things, by a survey of citizens. For example, the rate for people who have been vaccinated once and completely is likely to be up to five percentage points higher. For people over the age of 18, on the reference date 5.10. So up to 84 percent have already been vaccinated at least once and up to 80 percent completely. After the publication of this report, there was criticism of RKI boss Wieler, among other things.
The Berlin virologist Christian Drosten, however, took the RKI under protection. He does not consider the unilateral assignment of blame to the RKI and Lothar Wieler to be justified, said the expert from the Berlin Charité on Tuesday in the “Coronavirus Update” podcast at NDR-Info. The topic is not new either, the RKI has been pointing out the problem for a long time. Ultimately, the public excitement about the discrepancy is “completely in vain,” said Drosten. The situation has not changed.
On Wednesday, the RKI gave the reported rate of fully vaccinated adults as 76.0. In relation to the total population, 65.4 percent are fully vaccinated.
In its announcement, the RKI pointed out that a target vaccination rate of at least 85 percent for all 12 to 59 year olds and of at least 90 percent for those over 60 is aimed for. This goal has not yet been achieved, even taking into account the presumably higher actual vaccination rate.
Drosten spoke out in favor of loosening corona protective measures only gradually: “The most important thing is to close the vaccination gaps. And then we open up step by step, one step at a time. ”The quota should be increased“ as high as possible ”.
According to the Frankfurt virologist Sandra Ciesek, the further development of the pandemic in Germany is currently difficult to assess. However, it has often been observed that the number of infections is rising again after the school holidays, she also said in the NDR “Coronavirus Update”.
The infection situation in Germany has now been comparatively stable for several weeks. The RKI gave the 7-day incidence on Wednesday at 65.4; it has been in a corridor between 60 and 70 for three weeks. The number of corona patients admitted to clinics per 100,000 inhabitants within seven days – for a possible tightening of the corona restrictions – the most important parameters – the RKI stated on Wednesday at 1.90, the comparative value of the previous week was 1.65. A nationwide threshold, from when the situation can be viewed critically, is not provided, among other things because of large regional differences.
Ciesek criticized this so-called hospitalization incidence “as the measure of all things”: According to the virologist, the indicator depicts the actual exposure imprecisely in many ways. For example, she advocated taking a closer look at the location of the university hospitals, as they gave priority to Covid 19 patients. Even within individual hospitals, departments are stressed to different degrees. dpa
