Health Minister Wolfgang Mückstein is now countering Vienna City Councilor for Health Peter Hacker. This had recently burst because of the data chaos in the Ministry of Health. In an angry letter he vented his anger – the eXXpress reported.
Before Monday ended, Mückstein responded with a reply. In particular, he does not let Hacker’s accusation of non-transparent and much too late communication sit: “Our house, esteemed City Councilor, dear Peter, of course communicated transparently immediately and on the appropriate channels,” quoted “Today” from the letter.
“A lot has happened” in the IT sector in particular: “A huge task” has been mastered, “especially when you remember that at the beginning of the pandemic, individual authorities still transmitted their daily data in analogue form.” But with the omicron wave, a “completely new dimension” was reached in view of the massive increase in daily case reports. The different test situations in the federal states are a particular challenge.
The associated effort is correspondingly high, but the Minister of Health wants to stick to the previous procedure despite the delays, because: “The sheer volume of data […] cannot be used as an excuse to lower the quality standards in this area”. The departments responsible for this “have been working flat out for days to deal with this challenge as quickly as possible without damaging the data quality.”
The procedure: First, an automated script is run through the so-called linelist in order to identify and delete duplicate entries. If there are several positive reports with an EMS ID, the employees are at the start. In some cases, they would have to make follow-up calls to the federal states for verification. Since the beginning of the pandemic, 1.6 million cases have already been checked.
“The federal state of Vienna will always be able to find a responsible and reliable partner in my ministry,” summarizes the Green Party.
