The Bavarian state government has countered the impression that it is working with distorted incidence figures for vaccinated and unvaccinated people in order to persuade unvaccinated people to be vaccinated.

The newspaper "Welt" had previously reported that the authority responsible for collecting the data in Bavaria, the State Office for Health and Food Safety (LGL), apparently often does not know the vaccination status of infected people.

The same applies to Hamburg, for example.

Timo Frasch

Political correspondent in Munich.

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A spokesman for the Bavarian LGL reported, for example, for the week before November 24th that a total of 81,782 corona cases had been reported during this time - 9641 people had complete vaccination protection, 14,652 none.

In 57,489 cases, the vaccination status was "unknown".

Instead of subtracting those cases, the authorities assigned them to the group of unvaccinated persons and, on the basis of this count, reported the vaccinated and unvaccinated incidence.

The number of tests in the different groups did not play a role either.

Söder advertised vaccinations with graphics

On November 18, the Bavarian Prime Minister Markus Söder (CSU) wrote on Twitter: “Unfortunately, corona infections are increasing dramatically, especially among those who have not been vaccinated.

There is a direct correlation between low vaccination rates and high infection rates.

So please get vaccinated.

Only vaccination helps. ”He also posted a graph according to which the seven-day incidence of the unvaccinated was 1469 and that of the vaccinated was just 110.

At the request of the FAZ, a spokesman for the Bavarian State Chancellery announced that it was using figures provided by the LGL and the Bavarian Ministry of Health.

How these figures come about is “solely” the responsibility of the LGL and the Ministry of Health.

LGL rejects allegations

On Sunday, the LGL “decidedly” rejected the accusation that it had not correctly published data on the incidence of vaccinated and unvaccinated people. LGL President Walter Jonas announced: “In all of our LGL publications and on our website, we refer to our calculation bases as well as to the limits of the values ​​with which we can work. The transparency is given at all times. "

He added: “We decided to count the cases without information on vaccination status as unvaccinated first. Because it turned out that these - according to later available data - were unvaccinated in the vast majority of cases. Merely omitting the missing values ​​would have led to completely wrong incidence ratios, ”says Jonas. "The assessment of the incidence ratios of the vaccinated to the unvaccinated population is, among other factors, a further important parameter in order to be able to epidemiologically evaluate the infection dynamics in Bavaria."

Even after a change in the calculation, “nothing will change in the fact that the incidence in the unvaccinated is many times higher than that in the vaccinated.

The fact that unvaccinated people are exposed to a significantly higher risk of getting seriously ill with Covid-19 will still change something. "