Around 40 percent of the people hospitalized in connection with a corona infection in 2021 were not reported to the BAG.
In addition to patient care, reporting to the authorities was often forgotten. Picture taken in Lausanne.
In 2021, too, the Swiss healthcare system was not able to promptly and completely record the people hospitalized with or because of Covid-19. This is shown by data recently published by the Federal Statistical Office (BfS), which provide a more precise picture. While the Federal Office of Public Health assumed around 38,000 hospitalized patients in connection with the corona virus by mid-December 2021, the BfS has almost 64,000 people.
Already at the end of last year, the incomplete figures caused a lot of discussion. At that time, the BAG values were a third smaller. It is now apparent that the reporting gap has changed little even in the second year of the pandemic.
The reason for the differences in the numbers is that the BAG and BfS use different systems for recording. Reporting to the BfS is a well-rehearsed process that is linked to invoicing and only happens once a year, so the figures should come close to the actual values. With the BAG statistics, on the other hand, the hospitals continuously provide the latest figures, the process was only digitized during the course of the corona pandemic.
From taillight to model student
Depending on the canton, there are clear differences in how reliably the hospitals in the cantons use the FOPH system. In the cantons of Geneva and Zug, the BAG reports for 2020 differed most clearly from the BfS figures. While an error in the process had been identified in the Geneva University Hospital and improvements were promised, the discrepancy in Zug could not be explained. In Glarus or in Ticino, on the other hand, the doctors reported almost all Covid patients.
In fact, something has changed in the two tail lights since then. In Geneva, the hospitals achieved a reporting rate of 92 percent in 2021, in Zug it was 65 percent. In other cantons, however, reporting discipline has slackened, including in densely populated cantons such as Valais, Vaud and St. Gallen.
The strain on healthcare workers during the pandemic is likely to be one reason for the lack of reporting. However, the reporting gaps did not only arise during the big corona waves, when the hospital staff was under a lot of strain and the forms were perhaps understandably left behind. And especially in the canton of Ticino, which was badly affected in 2020, a high reporting rate was achieved.
There is no direct benefit
There are also big differences in the summer months, when fewer corona patients were admitted. There is also no discernible trend towards greater nationwide reporting discipline. It seems that this is not just a matter of negligence caused by stress or difficulties getting used to it, but a fundamental problem in the reporting process.
The BfS is coming in a report Finally, the notification to the BAG is “a burden for the service providers that promises relatively little direct benefit”. Reporting is of little use to doctors and hospitals, and failure to report does not have any direct negative consequences, apart from incomplete statistics. A control of the numbers was suspended during the pandemic to avoid an additional burden on the system.
The answer to the question of how many people were actually in hospital because of or with Covid-19 can therefore only be clarified with a considerable delay. A similar problem is also evident in the number of deaths. Here, the more precise BfS values from the cause of death statistics for 2020 were around a quarter higher than the figures from the BAG. The BfS statistics for the causes of death in 2021 will not be available until next year.