[ad_1]
The Director General of Health, Graça Freitas, clarified this Monday that the data from the National Epidemiological Surveillance System (SINAVE) are epidemiological and not scientific surveillance, with information that allows the epidemic to be followed and measures taken.
Graça Freitas commented in this way, in the regular conference on covid-19, a study signed by 12 researchers from the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Porto, published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.
The study, released by TSF, concludes that the databases of the National Epidemiological Surveillance System (SINAVE) that have been provided to the scientific community, in recent months, on cases of covid-19, they have low quality, errors, inconsistencies and a lot of missing information.
“The data we are talking about is not scientific research data, it is epidemiological surveillance data and is obtained through what doctors and laboratories fill in and there are parameters that go very well and there are others, as in the whole world, that come less full “explained Graça Freitas.
He also stressed that it is necessary to realize that at a time when there are “thousands of new cases per day, in fact, the highest priority is to detect patients, treat patients, isolate contacts and tackle the epidemic. “
“There are a lot of cases and contacts that arrive every day that are not perfect, however, I want to say here that we have an excellent relationship with the academy,” said Graça Freitas.
According to the CEO, the data is made available to academics, who have “a very important role in assessing the quality of this data.”
“In fact, it is part of your job to see the databases, if they are correctly filled in (…) and the university itself, the academy itself can make corrections to that information and clarifications and improve the quality of their studies”, Held.
The main function of epidemiological surveillance is to have “rapid surveillance” that allows health authorities to monitor the epidemic to take action and that is why it is called “surveillance for action.”
Therefore, Graça Freitas said, “the academy network has been an invaluable partner, especially in improving these databases”.
According to TSF, the list of flaws pointed out in the study is long and includes cartoonish and other details that reveal more structural problems in the part of the SINAVE database, which is completed by doctors, which was the only one that DGS agreed to. Send. researchers.
For example, the cases of a 134-year-old patient and three men classified as ‘pregnant’, as well as 19 patients who allegedly had the disease before the first case known to have been diagnosed in Portugal.
There are still months with far fewer patients than those revealed in the DGS daily bulletins and other months with more.
The covid-19 pandemic caused at least 1,255,803 deaths in more than 50.3 million cases of infection worldwide, according to a report by the French agency AFP.
In Portugal 2,959 people died for 183,420 confirmed cases of infection, according to the most recent bulletin of the General Directorate of Health.
[ad_2]
