Dutch COVID-19 Data Sources & Their Interpretation - Bert Hubert's writings
a day ago
- The three main Dutch COVID-19 data sources are RIVM (national disease notifications), LCPS (hospital capacity), and NICE (hospitalizations), each with different reporting methods and timeframes.
- RIVM's daily OSIRIS data includes positive tests, hospitalizations, and deaths, but the 'Date_statistics' field is overloaded (representing symptom onset, lab result, or notification date), causing confusion in trends.
- LCPS tracks bed occupancy (absolute numbers) and new admissions separately, while NICE reports admissions only (not discharges), leading to discrepancies between sources.
- GGDs provide weekly test counts and positivity rates, but do not include commercial rapid-testing data, which is largely unreported due to legal ambiguities and variation in reporting requirements.
- Derived data includes a government dashboard (in English) and a weekly 60-page PDF (in Dutch) with additional metrics like R number and test positivity.
- RIVM data fields include age group, sex, province, hospital admission status (only for COVID-19-specific admissions), deceased status, and week of death, but recovery is not tracked.
- LCPS data provides ICU and general ward bed counts for COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 patients, plus new admissions since October 17.
- NICE data includes suspected COVID-19 cases that may later be disproven, making recent data less reliable; their raw data feed is unofficial and requires careful interpretation.