Europe's news in English

COPY LINK

THEFT

Computer with data on 20,000 people stolen in Denmark

Confidential data on 20,000 residents in Gladsaxe, a municipality in central Zealand, were saved locally on a computer stolen that was recently stolen from the town’s city hall.

Published: 11 December 2018 15:13 CET

Computer with data on 20,000 people stolen in Denmark

Gladsaxe City Hall. Photo: Kjeld Johansen/Wikimedia commons

The computer was stolen during a break-in between during the weekend of November 30th to December 3rd, Politiken reports.

Information stored on the machine includes personal registration numbers, age, gender, address and marital status.

In some cases, details of social welfare payments and housing as well as membership of the Church of Denmark are also listed.

Gladsaxe Municipality informed affected residents of the issue on Monday.

Personal information is normally protected, including from incidences of theft, according to the council.

“But in this case, one of the (stolen) computers contained a spreadsheet with confidential information which, due to human error, was temporarily saved locally on the computer,” the municipality wrote.

It is unclear whether people living in other municipalities may also have been affected, given that the data was for the purpose of checking accounts between Gladsaxe and other areas.

The municipality has reported the incident to the Danish Data Protection Agency (Datatilsynet) and to the police, but risks a fine over the incident due to GDPR rules.

Municipal director Bo Rasmussen expressed his apologies over the theft and said it was difficult to prevent human error.

“But we have, in the last few months, made a huge effort to inform our managers and staff on how to deal with sensitive information in a secure way according to data protection rules. But this happened nevertheless,” Rasmussen said to Politiken.

“That’s not good enough,” he said.

The director added that he hoped the theft was targeted at the hardware rather than the data, in which case the hard disk containing the confidential information is likely to have been wiped.

READ ALSO: Data of over 40,000 in Denmark may have been shared with Cambridge Analytica

MAPS: Where have Norway's one million coronavirus vaccinations been given?

Photo: Luis ACOSTA / AFP

On Friday SYSVAK, Norway’s vaccine register, showed that 1,025,436 people had taken their first jab, with a further 300,032 people being fully vaccinated with both doses.

How are vaccines distributed in Norway?

Vaccines are distributed by the government based upon how many people in risk groups are in each municipality. Supply is also prioritised to areas with high infection rates, such as Oslo.

Once vaccines are given to municipalities the rest of the vaccination process is handled individually by the local authorities.

So far, central authorities have distributed over 1.2 million vaccines to municipalities.

The Pfizer vaccine is the most common serum in Norway with over 930,000 jabs being distributed.

AstraZeneca is the next most widely used, with almost 180,000 of the Anglo-Swedish manufacturer’s doses being sent out to municipalities. Around 50,000 thousand of these doses are still in storage however, as the vaccine’s use has been suspended since March.

Moderna is the least common vaccine in Norway with just over 100,000 doses being handed out to local authorities.

First dose administered, per county

Unsurprisingly, Oslo and Viken have received the lion’s share of the vaccines so far. This is due to the Oslo being the largest city in Norway and Viken being the most populous county.

More than 220,000 people have been vaccinated with their first dose in Viken and over 120,000 have gotten their first dose in Oslo.

Another reason for Oslo and Viken vaccinating more people than anywhere else is also due to the high infection incidence in the counties. According national health authority NIPH’s latest weekly report, Oslo and Viken County are responsible for almost three quarters of coronavirus infections in Norway.

Troms and Finnmark counties have administered the fewest doses so far. This is due in part to the low population and the government’s prioritisation of vaccines towards Covid-19 hotspots.

Below you can see a map of how many first doses have been administered in each county.

Second dose administered, by county

More than twice the number of people are fully vaccinated in Viken than anywhere else in the country.

There are also five and a half more fully vaccinated people in Viken than in the county with the lowest amount of fully vaccinated people, Troms and Finnmark.

At the time of writing, western county Vestland has the second-highest number of people to have received both their first and second jabs.

The interactive map below shows how many fully vaccinated people there are in each county.

First dose by municipality

Norway’s largest cities dominate the list of municipalities to have given people their first jab.

Oslo has vaccinated more than double the number than the municipality to vaccinate the second most people, Bergen.

The capital municipality has vaccinated more than 2,100 times more people than Utsira, which has given the least people their first jab with 69.

But proportionally, Utsira has vaccinated many more of its inhabitants than Oslo as it only has a population of 211.

You can see the data for all 356 of Norway’s municipalities below.

Second dose by municipality

21 percent of residents in the tiny municipality of Utsira have been fully vaccinated. This is 15.5 percent higher than the national average. In total, 45 people in Utsira are fully vaccinated.

Oslo has fully vaccinated 33,954 of its residents by far, more than double the amount any other municipality has managed to date. Only Oslo and Bergen have vaccinated more than 10,000 people with both doses at present.

Below you can see a map containing the data for each municipality to have administered both doses of a vaccine.

Url copied to clipboard!