By Toby McIntosh
Improvising governments worldwide are providing uneven information about the Covid-19 pandemic and their efforts combat it, operating without an international standard on what to disclose.
This isn’t about the issuance of basic public health information, such as how and why to wash your hands or what social distancing means.
Rather, this concerns information to help citizens understand how rampant the disease is in their communities, such as death and infection rates, and what steps are being taken to combat it, such as testing and medical care.
There appears to be no international standard on what data should be disclosed and transparency levels vary widely among nations and localities, according to interviews with experts and online research.
Usefully, a comprehensive list of what disclosures should ideally be made has been compiled recently by Article 19, the London-based nongovernmental organization concerned with free expression and access to information.
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Fodder for Debate Over Ideal Disclosure
The Article 19 list may encourage development of disclosure guidelines for future pandemics, a debate what can be informed by controversies that have emerged in the context of Covid-19.
At the international level, the World Health Organization’s Covid-19 dashboard publishes daily information on confirmed cases and deaths, broken down by country, displayed with charts and maps. There are many other sources of similar data, both public and commercial.
At national and local levels, a great deal of specific information is available, both about the course of the pandemic and about the resources to manage it.
What gets disclosed, however, is often less than what could be.
Even disclosure of information as basic as the number of deaths due to Covid-19 has generated controversy. There have been debates about the quality of the data as undercounting have been revealed, but there also are questions about what should be reported.
Some institutions, such as prisons, hospitals and nursing homes, were reluctant to disclose their casualties. Also, failure to issue demographic breakdowns has limited information on differential effects within populations. In addition, geographic reporting zones are sometimes too large, depriving local communities of useful information about the situation.
Some of these disclosure decisions may have been political, and others may have been based on concerns for personal privacy or public safety. Legitimate debates may be justified about the disclosures that Article 19 has proposed.
Confidentiality arguments need to be weighed against the public interest in receiving information about the scope of the pandemic and its handling.
Data can help answer many critical questions, including whether the pandemic is receding. There are many related bits of potentially relevant information, such as how many infections there are, how many occur each day and where, how many tests have been conducted and the results, how many hospitalizations have occurred, and more.
Similarly, there are multiple pieces of information about preparedness and treatment that also could be disclosed. For example, about availability of personal protective equipment in hospitals, ventilators and hospital beds.
More complicated disclosure discussions might arise about other items in Article 19’s list, such as transparency about predictive models.
There has been limited comparative reporting on statistics. For example, this article by Stateline contrasts disclosures in six US states. Potentially, cross-national studies will be conducted and the value of disclosure will be explored, since some governments have severely restricted not only the flow of official data, but also the publication of unofficial data.
Renée Diresta, technical research manager at the Stanford University Internet Observatory, wrote in The Atlantic about the need to communicate effectively, concluding:
If institutions and authority figures don’t adapt to the content and conversation dynamics of the day, other things will fill the void. The time for institutions and authorities to begin communicating transparently is before wild speculation goes viral. Preventing epidemics of misinformation from spreading is easier than curing them once they’ve taken hold.
The Article 19 list, part of a larger report on transparency and Covid-19, is a starting point for discussion of disclosure in a time of pandemics. The portion of the report in reprinted below.
Text of Article 19 Report Concerning Disclosure of Health Information
Crucial Information to be Published
In this time, it is not enough that governments maintain their existing transparency obligations; rather, as set out earlier, they have obligations under international law to make information about the crisis and actions they are taking publicly available. The UN Secretary-General has called on states to make available more information as a means to combating the pandemic: “The free flow of timely, accurate, factual information and disaggregated data, including by sex, is essential, so those seeking to scrutinize or critique the effectiveness of government actions must be able to play their part.”
This section highlights key sets of information and data relating to the impacts and efforts to mitigating the pandemic, which have been repeatedly requested across jurisdictions by media and civil society organisations. Governments should make exceptional efforts to proactively publish the following information:
Health Information
This information should be published daily, in a commonly agreed to, open, and reusable format:
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- Number of identified and suspected cases disaggregated by health status, location, ethnicity, gender, and age; number of health care workers and other key workers affected;
- Number of persons died both in hospital and outside, hospitalised, in intensive care, needing ventilators, discharged, or in quarantine, disaggregated by location, ethnicity, gender, and age; number of health care workers and other key workers affected;
- Number of tests conducted and results disaggregated by location, ethnicity, gender, and age, number of health care workers and other key workers tested, criteria for eligibility for testing;
- Number of people contacted and missed using contact tracing, number of people employed to conduct tracing;
- Availability of health care facilities providing testing, stockpiles of supplies and equipment, hospital beds, waiting times, disaggregated by location;
- Names and locations of hospitals, health, social and other care facilities, and prisons and other criminal facilities affected, including number of cases disaggregated;
- Number of scheduled medical and other procedures that have been cancelled due to the pandemic, disaggregated;
- Algorithms, models, and underlying assumptions used to estimate spread of disease and impacts; evidence about other pandemics and data; epidemiological and behavioural predictions;
- Names and biographies of the members of all external groups or committees providing scientific, economic, or other advice to public bodies; copies of all minutes of meetings, working documents and advice provided to governments;
- Existing and planned trials for new preventative vaccines, drugs and measures, treatments and cures, with detailed results;
- Existing and planned studies on infection levels with disaggregated results; and
- Emergency and contingency plans and evaluations, preparedness tests, purchasing and stockpiling plans, communications plans, and situation reports.
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