The RKI line list dataset from Germany provides 17 metadata fields for each patient. No unique ID is provided per patient. The reporting date (‘Meldedatum’) is used as the date of confirmation of the patient in our database, and corresponds to the date when the German Federal Ministry of Health became aware of the case. The RKI will only publish cases which not only have clinical symptoms but which are also confirmed using a laboratory test. The Global.health ingestion process will automatically ignore cases which are earlier than the earliest allowed date of 1st November 2019. According to the WHO the first COVID-19 case in Germany was detected on January 28th 2020, but the dataset contains one case with a confirmation date before this but after the earliest allowable date (2nd January 2020).

The dataset contains geographic information regarding administrative levels 1 (‘Bundesland’) and 3 (‘IdLandkreis’, ‘Landkreis’). Although level 3 information is reported both as a name (‘Landkreis’) and code (‘IdLandkreis’), the code is used for geocoding to avoid issues associated with differential spelling. Some entries have leading zeros which must be removed in order to match with the data obtained from the Nationale Plattform für geographische Daten. Where no match is found, location to administrative level 1 is geocoded using Mapbox. Note that this includes all subdivisions within Berlin as these are officially administrative area level 2, and thereby are not present in the dataset obtained from the Nationale Plattform für geographische Daten. Berlin cases are therefore all geocoded to level 1, namely ‘Berlin’. The cases are assigned a location by RKI according to the federal state or district where the case was reported. This usually corresponds to the place of residence or habitual residence of the patient and not necessarily the place where the person is likely to have been infected. 

The RKI dataset groups cases with identical metadata entries together and then reports on the total count of cases with this set of attributes (‘AnzahlFall’). This number is then used by our parser to enter the corresponding number of identical cases into the database. The outcome of the cases can be one of death (‘AnzahlTodesfall’) or recovery (‘AnzahlGenesen’). Because of case grouping the number of recovered or dead patients will always be identical to the total number of cases in that group (i.e ‘AnzahlFall’ will always be identical to either ‘AnzahlTodesfall’ or ‘AnzahlGenesen’).