The “Hospital & Transport Surge Capacity” committee has decided that as from Saturday 20 March 2021, hospitals will no longer have to send their COVID-19 surveillance data to Sciensano on Saturdays, to reduce their workload. They can postpone reporting the data from Saturday to Sunday (in 2 separate registrations for Saturday and Sunday). As a consequence, the COVID-19 figures will not be updated on Sundays anymore.
Update: On March 23, 2021, The “Hospital & Transport Surge Capacity” committee has revoked the decision of March 16, 2021, as described in the press release below. Read the news on the restart of reporting on during the weekend from March 27, 2021.
The daily reporting of hospital figures is a heavy administrative burden for the hospitals, a burden that comes on top of caring for COVID-19 patients. From now on, hospitals will be allowed to postpone Saturday’s reporting to Sunday. This means that the COVID-19 figures will not be updated on the Epistat dashboard of Sciensano and in the open datasets on Sundays. In addition, no daily report will be published on Sundays. The final weekend statistics will be available every Monday morning on 9 a.m. on the dashboard and from 11 a.m. in the daily report (available in French or Dutch).
This decision has no effect on the surveillance activities in the context of the current epidemic. We continue to monitor the epidemiological situation closely and do not base our analysis on the figures of one day, but on the trends and various indicators.