In principle, we should be glad that a central database on the epidemic has been created. They unloaded a teenager who showed them how to do it. And we become so paranoid that we want to look for communications specialists among laboratory workers, " says Alek Tarkovsky, president of the Digital Center Foundation.
While the number of people hospitalized due to COVID-19 is falling, and all signs in heaven and earth indicate that there will be no need for a "National Quarantine," the debate over data on the epidemic is raging on professional and social media. All this is due to the deterioration of the economy, among other things. In connection with the quarantine, the question of work is acute,and many move to the online sphere, knowing that you can earn additional income, as deltamarket broker does many professions in connection with the pandemic were called into question.
So far, district and regional sanitary and epidemiological stations have published on their websites data about their region-the number of detected infections, deaths, recoveries, hospitalizations, quarantines and people under epidemiological surveillance. They did this because it was their job to prepare the reports they submitted to the Ministry of Health. It was in the SEZ that the laboratories reported on the number of tests carried out and positive results. The health resort, in turn, published daily data across Poland on social networks.
All this information was summarized and published on one sheet m.in 19-year-old Michal Rogalski. he did it as a social activity. its aggregated data and graphs have been used by the media, as well as by research groups dealing with the epidemic.
What happened to the thousands of infections?
Before the data disappeared from sse websites, rogalski found discrepancies between the number of infections reported locally in mazowiec and those reported by the ministry of health. We were talking about tens of thousands of cases that were not in the data of the Ministry. The case was all the more important because at the time, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki declared a "national quarantine" if the number of infections in Poland rose above a certain level. If you add up these "lost infections", then this is how it should be.
Morawiecki announced, however, that infections are falling and there will be no blockage. this has raised suspicions among many social media users that the authorities are manipulating the numbers. The Ministry attributed this to errors and delays in reporting and reporting them by various methods. However, suspicions were further heightened when it became clear that partial data had disappeared from the pages of the GSE-acting Chief Health Inspector Krzysztof Sachka banned their publication. On the same day, the official Central Data Service started working in the evening. This did not allay my suspicions.
The central database was made possible by the introduction of the EWS system, in which laboratories directly report test results, and sanitary and epidemiological stations-on quarantine information. Previously, sanepid-before the pandemic, the most underfunded and least digitized government agency-inserted them into Excel spreadsheets. However, the new public database is incomplete compared to the data collected by volunteers. In addition, according to biqdata, some private laboratories have not yet received keys to the EWS database, and therefore the data provided is incomplete.
In EYE. press, we write that the data that should first be considered when analyzing the course of the epidemic is primarily data on hospitalizations, patients in serious condition and deaths. the number of detected infections is less significant, because it depends on too many factors-the adopted testing strategy, the percentage of positive results, and delays in reporting.
And we talk about digitalization, the availability of public data, conspiracies and distrust of government with Dr. Alki Tarkovsky, a sociologist and president of the Digital Center Foundation, which has been promoting the principle of open access to data and other public resources for a decade.
Digitization – somehow we will climb up
Milada jendrysik: We met 10 years ago when you were a digital expert in Prime Minister Tusk's team of advisers. the plans for digitalization of the state were ambitious at that time, and the future was bright. And a little on this plan ended. After 10 years and 10 months of the epidemic, the Ministry of Health has finally spat out a central database on it-so far incomplete. Previously, the best database on COVID-19 was managed by 19-year-old Michal Rogalski.
Alek Tarkovsky: Digitization is still not so good. On the one hand, open data is well known. There is a page dane.gov.pl from which you can download multiple databases.
Finally, the pandemic has accelerated the digitalization of healthcare-an electronic prescription has appeared, and an electronic patient bill is being distributed. And here is EWS, a database of infected and quarantined people, from which data about the epidemic is downloaded to the site gov.pl, almost just started to fully function.
What has been implemented in recent years is the participation of citizens in the legislative process-for political reasons. Let's agree that previous governments had problems with this, but everything was going in the right direction. New platforms for social consultations are being developed. Over the past five years, this process has completely collapsed. It is clear why-if even the parliament does not process the laws correctly, then where can citizens make any comments?
Nevertheless, in fairly objective ratings of open data, we somehow climb up, although the availability of this data is still average. However, in the former digitization department, which is now included in the CPRM, there is a great awareness of this problem. It has not yet reached other institutions, but the process continues.
The slogan of open data has always been, in my opinion, non-political, in any case, it was the policy of the authorities-the Institute of Meteorology and Water Management, for example, lived with forecasts and refused to publish their data. But this was not a "big" policy, but a certain culture of the organization.
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