Serbian Health Ministry fails to update COVID data

The Health Ministry updates the covid19.rs site which is supposed to publish the number of new cases, number of deaths and number of hospitalized patients daily. When it was set up the data was updated every day at 3:00 pm and the site became the main source of information about the pandemic. Over the past few months the data has been updated late in the afternoon or early in the evening. There have been several days when the site was no updated with media reporting data from the Health Ministry web site when it became available.

The pandemic data was not updated on either the covid19.rs or the ministry site (www.zdravlje.gov.rs) by noon on Friday.

According to covid19.rs 6 people died of coronavirus-related ailments over the previous 24 hours, 10,630 were tested with 1,037 testing positive for the SARSCoV2 coronavirus and 23 patients on ventilators. The total number of deaths now stands at 17,215.

The new Health Minister Danica Grujicic said the data was not updated because of changes in the shifts of staff charged with releasing the data. According to her, the data was collected from all hospitals late on Thursday night. “This will not happen again,” she said.

The political opposition and expert NGOs have disputed the official data on several occassions.