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A study signed by 12 researchers from the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Porto, recently published in an international scientific journal, concludes that the databases of the National Epidemiological Surveillance System (SINAVE) that have been provided to the scientific community in the In recent months, on the Covid-19 cases, they have low quality, errors, inconsistencies and a lot of missing information.
More serious: the above problems have led other studies, based on these data, to present conclusions that may not be correct, that is, in the greater or lesser risk that certain patients, with existing chronic diseases, have more complications if they contract the new coronavirus. .
The article to which TSF had access, published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, warns that in this way the data made available by the General Directorate of Health (DGS) to academy researchers can only have very limited uses and little helpful in helping stop the pandemic.
The list of flaws is long and includes cartoons and other details that reveal more structural problems in the part of the SINAVE database, the one completed by doctors, which was the only one that DGS agreed to send to 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 much fewer patients than those revealed in the DGS daily bulletins and other months with more … but also months (May) with half of the publicly known deaths and others (June) with zero victims, when knows from daily bulletins that this month the pandemic killed 155 people.
On the other hand, 90% of the cases in the database provided by DGS do not present the date of the positive test and a large part does not say whether the infected person had to go to intensive care or not.
Between the two databases sent to the researchers, one in April and one in August, there was much different information, for the same patients, in thousands of cases, that is, in pre-existing diseases (8,902 cases).
In the first database, it was identified that 40% of those infected had no previous chronic diseases, but in the second the same people already appeared as if it was not known if these diseases existed.
Cristina Costa Santos, one of the 12 researchers at the Center for Research in Health Technologies and Services (CINTESIS) and the Department of Community Medicine at the University of Porto, explains that they were more concerned when they discovered that there are at least three scientific articles already published using the data provided by DGS, and in at least one of them the results were clearly “skewed by poor data quality.
The researcher understands that the DGS has decided to send data from only one of the databases with information on infected and patients with Covid-19 to the academic community, but that does not explain so many failures, in a concern that is aggravated, taking into account , as he recalls. , which is this type of study that often helps policy makers make decisions to control the pandemic.
If the data is analyzed “without taking into account the quality of the data, this is dangerous and can produce, as has already happened, biased scientific articles, but it is much worse than that because it is these studies that lead to decisions about how manage the pandemic, ”says Cristina Costa Santos.
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