In COVID-19 fight, where’s the data?

Even after extensive effort by the Health Ministry, researchers and health professionals often do not have enough access to complete, raw data sets to make important decisions during the coronavirus crisis, according to Nadav Davidovitch, director of the School of Public Health at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

The country is in a state of uncertainty, he told The Jerusalem Post, adding that data transparency is essential to diminish that uncertainty, help leaders make proper decisions and increase public trust in the decisions being made by the Health Ministry and the government.

According to Eyal Leshem, director of the Center for

Travel Medicine and Tropical Diseases at Sheba Medical Center in Tel Hashomer: “Policy makers and researchers need to have access to updated, clean data so that they can study the disease and possible interventions. The data cannot remain monopolized in the hands of the Health Ministry,” which “needs to provide the resources to make the data accessible to all researchers based on a formalized data request.”

So where is the data? According to Davidovitch, the pandemic gradually moved from a state of prevention and containment to one of widespread community transmission, which caused the data-gathering system to become overwhelmed.

“It took time to arrange all the categories and forms for data collection,” he said, explaining that in the beginning, data was not available for good reason – it was being managed by different entities, and it took time to have all the information consolidated into one system.

Later on, data became more available, but only in an aggregated form – possibly for privacy reasons, which he said was understandable.

Now, however, nearly five months after the pandemic hit Israel, the data is still not fully available, especially for more sophisticated analysis, which Davidovitch said is becoming problematic.

For example, it is still unknown where as many as a third of the country’s coronavirus cases became infected. Moreover, the heated discussion in the Knesset coronavirus committee for the last several days has centered on the Health Ministry’s inability to provide exact data on the number of people infected in swimming pools. It has also been difficult to know how effective the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) surveillance system is.

“Sometimes the data is available for decision-making in the [Health Ministry] headquarters,” Davidovitch said, “but less so for academicians, health funds, regional health authorities and other professionals” who want to answer

such pressing questions as: Where are people getting infected? Where are the infected person’s contacts