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“Absence of data in Chile on Covid-19: A situation that should concern us.” That is the title of the publication made this afternoon on its website by the Instituto Milenio Fundamentos de los Datos (IMFD), one of the most relevant entities in the academic sector that integrates the Coronavirus Data Table promoted by the Ministry of Science, informing of the freezing of their participation in the instance with strong criticism of the role of the government – and in particular the Ministry of Health – in making information available.
“The lack, until now, of open information on health data that allows us to do the work that is committed, has made the IMFD decide to freeze its participation in the Data Table, at least until said initiative has the information required for science to carry out its work ”, manifests the publication of the institute, housed at the University of Chile and the Pontificia Universidad Católica and with a presence in several universities in the country, and which brings together with a multidisciplinary approach “experts in computer science, statistics, political science and communications”, as reviewed on their website.
The official text also links to another article: a publication made on the Medium platform by seven of the entity’s main researchers -among them, its director, Marcelo Arenas, and its alternate director, Pablo Barceló-, where they delve into the questions and point out that even the institution made available a tool that would allow the data from the Covid-19 cases to be analyzed anonymously, which has been one of the most relevant issues raised by the Minsal to maintain the protection of information.
“The Covid-19 Data Desk identified the need for a tool that would automatically anonymize sensitive data on patients and suspected Covid-19 cases. This system was developed by the Instituto Milenio Fundamentos de los Datos, and is currently available for use by the health authority, only requiring for it to have periodically information coming from the epidemiological data of the health system, “says the publication of the academics in Medium.
Then, the criticism points to the country’s health authorities. “It seems that the political repercussion that could be generated by making certain processes auditable by the citizens, takes precedence over the fundamental objective of confronting the pandemic with the best tools available to us, taking us to have scientists, experts and citizens without being able to count on important data. And this is a problem that goes beyond the health authority, we believe that it is rooted in our lack of an open data culture ”.
Furthermore, detailing various works that have emerged during the pandemic, it is stated that “these initiatives, among which is the Data Table, have rapidly worked on technical solutions; but today they are waiting for the political will to open the information of the Ministry of Health. “
“It seems urgent to us that the Ministry of Health gives disaggregated and anonymized access to data on patients, suspected and discarded of being infected by Covid-19, and the data on people tested, positive and negative ”, raise the IMFD academics in their publication.
The Data Table was an instance that emerged in March from the efforts of the Ministry of Sciences, headed by Andrés Couve, in order to make available “information for scientific and clinical research”, as indicated on its website. But several organizations that make up the body have already expressed concern in recent weeks about what they consider to be the absence of relevant information for the study of the pandemic and its effects in Chile.
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