Berlin center – There are statistics that one would not like to cite. Since the beginning of the pandemic, this has included the ranking of the places with the most reported corona cases. What is going wrong in the community that has the highest seven-day incidence in Germany? Are the rules too lax, are the citizens too careless?
On Thursday, Berlin-Mitte took over the top position. With a record incidence of 2286. The district is “Germany’s new hotspot”, according to reports. The incidence would mean that one in 43 people in Mitte tested positive for corona within seven days, using a PCR test, because only these cases are included in the statistics. PCR tests are difficult to get across Berlin right now, so the number of cases should be much higher in Mitte.
What’s going on in the middle? Is the district on the verge of a state of emergency?
On Thursday evening, the city councilor for health, Christoph Keller (left), explained the situation to the district assembly (BVV). The BVV met digitally. Keller looked surprisingly relaxed in his video image. He said right at the beginning that he had good news. The record incidence in Mitte does not indicate a record number of cases in the district, but is due, among other things, to changes in the reporting system.
Cases in clinics, laboratories and offices
There are three main reasons why the incidence in Berlin-Mitte is currently the highest, said Keller. All have to do with the district’s central location. The most important reason: The corona cases that are registered in the district’s hospitals because patients test positive on admission are reported to the RKI from Mitte – and attributed to Mitte. He decided that together with the head of the health department, medical officer Lukas Murajda, said Keller.
There are many hospitals in the district, including the Charité, if patients tested positive, the employees of the central health department had to assign the cases to the patient’s place of residence and forward the reports. This is time-consuming – and can no longer be achieved in the omicron wave. Keller called the solution “pragmatic and unbureaucratic”.
He listed two other reasons that have already led to the district’s incidence being skewed in the course of the pandemic so far. A particularly large number of laboratories that evaluate PCR tests are based in Mitte. If the information about a test is incomplete – for example, the registered address of the person tested is missing – the results are registered in the central health department. And reported from there. As cases from the Mitte district, even if the samples were taken from all over the city.
As a third reason, Keller cited the many offices, including open-plan offices, and venues in Mitte. If there are lists for “documenting the presence” of employees or visitors, and cases of infection are later reported, this data would also be processed in Mitte and “fed into the reporting system” by Mitte.
That also sounds pragmatic, there is probably no other way to regulate it when the health department is overloaded. If you follow Keller’s explanations, the numbers from Mitte no longer reflect the pandemic in the district. Mitte collects numbers that other districts no longer have to collect, the city council said. This helps the whole city – so that the incidence figures for all of Berlin are as up-to-date as possible.
By the way, on Friday the incidence in Mitte had fallen a little: to 2200.