The German health ministry has issued a correction after it published inflated numbers on COVID-19 hospitalisations as part of its “fact booster” awareness campaign.
Germany’s Federal Ministry of Health has issued a correction after it published an inflated percentage in relation to the number of COVID-19 cases that result in hospitalisations.
The ministry has said that the “misleading” information was published due to an “editorial error”, a particularly embarrassing admission considering the body’s minister, Karl Lauterbach, has recently been challenged on his citation of COVID death statistics in the context of justifying ongoing German lockdown rules.
According to a report by Der Spiegel, the German Ministry of Health took out a number of advertisements in newspapers and online as part of a campaign to raise awareness about the dangers of COVID-19.
However, one advertisement published both physically and online as part of this “Fact Booster” awareness campaign reportedly claimed that around 10 per cent of COVID cases result in hospitalisation, a statistic that the ministry has since admitted is incorrect.
Instead, the German federal body claims, the advertisement should have said that up to 10 per cent of cases can result in hospitalisation.
What’s more, the ministry reportedly admitted that the numbers right now are “significantly lower”, with the body saying that the real figure for hospitalisations is somewhere between four and five per cent of cases.
Der Spiegel reports that the Federal Ministry for Health has now corrected the campaign.
While embarrassing enough on its own, the apparent error by the body is made only worse by the fact that the German health minister, Karl Lauterbach, has recently been accused of making misleading claims in relation to national COVID statistics to justify his own draconian lockdown regime.
With the country being one of the few remaining nations in Europe to still have various measures — including the likes of mask mandates — in place, the left-wing politician has seemingly been keen to justify his actions, arguing on social media that the country would be “sitting like a rabbit in front of a snake” without them.
The politician noted that official statistics published by the government’s Robert Koch Institute indicated that COVID resulted in “almost 100 dead a day”, before arguing that without the implementation of further lockdown measures last week, the country would be left in an even worse place.
However, the German newspaper BILD has accused the minister of using “the number of corona deaths to promote his pandemic policy”, and that “Lauterbach cannot explain his own corona numbers”.
According to the publication, the statistics Lauterbach has cited make no distinction between the number of people who die with COVID, and the number of people who die as a result of the disease.
The publication goes on to claim that the health ministry has failed to provide them with statistics that do make the distinction.
“Although Karl Lauterbach argues for stricter measures with corona death numbers, his ministry can give NO answer to the BILD request (sic),” the publication wrote in its article challenging the minister.
BILD also claims to have seen a letter sent to Lauterbach from the German Hospital Society which reportedly informed the politician that it is not possible for them to create any “comprehensive, differentiated reports on deaths from or with Corona”, and that instead only “specific studies in selected hospitals” could be presented.
“The German Hospital Society does not know how many of the deceased who are included in the statistics of corona deaths really died because of the corona diseases,” the publication goes on to claim.
This is not the first time BILD has challenged Lauterbach on statements he has made in regards to COVID-19, with the publication having previously accused the official of being privately optimistic about the state of the pandemic while publicly describing the situation as being “critical“.