One of the main monitoring and surveillance bulletins in the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic in the country, InfoGripe, from the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz), has been unable to be done for a month as a result of the power outage in the Ministry of Health’s system.
The last update of the bulletin was made based on the data entered until December 6, 2021. Since then, researchers claim to be blind.
The problem also affects Fiocruz’s MonitoraCovid. The bulletin, open to the public, helps show the panorama of Covid-19 cases in the country. These data are essential to help guide governors and mayors and other managers to create effective strategies and measures to contain the spread of the virus.
The last scenario showed how were the cases of coronaviruses in Brazil at the end of November 2021, when we still didn’t have Ômicron circulating here. So far, without updated information, it is not possible to observe the dynamics of this new variant in the country.
The Covid-19 Observatory bulletin, also from Fiocruz, is another impacted, as it uses information generated by the Ministry of Health to guide and disseminate information about the pandemic based on data.
The Genomic Surveillance Network is also affected, as the calculation of weekly samples for each state depends on updated data from SIVEP-Gripe to be performed properly. This one, to this day, is based on the late-November scenario.
AT CNN, the Ministry of Health claimed, in a note, that the platforms e-SUS Notifica, Sivep-Gripe, SI-PNI and Conecta SUS were reestablished, enabling the inclusion of data by states and municipalities. However, he informs that “some of the data released may not yet appear in the systems’ interfaces”, without giving details of the reasons for this problem.
A researcher at Fiocruz’s Covid-19 Observatory, Raphael Guimarães laments the damage caused by the lack of data at a crucial moment of the pandemic. For him, when you don’t have adequate and timely information, “you get lost twice”.
“Firstly, because the production of public statistics is what legitimizes a country to understand its real problems under different dimensions, which sets the tone for the type of social welfare, economic strategy and prioritization of political issues. Ultimately, national sovereignty is lost. Second, by ignoring the real situation at the moment, the public manager faces the dilemma of making absolutely blind decisions, entering a gray zone where speculation prevails about the robustness of data analysis”, he pointed out.
Guimarães also pointed out that this level of uncertainty is the greatest challenge, noting that time and resources are invested “without any guarantee of return to reduce inequities and combat social, acute and chronic problems”.
Fiocruz’s InfoGripe coordinator, researcher Marcelo Gomes, explains that the insertion of data was, in fact, reestablished, as informed by the MS, however, the problem lies in accessing them. That is, in the transfer of this information by the Ministry of Health to researchers and, consequently, to the carrying out of the studies.
“That’s why we still haven’t received a transfer from the Ministry of Health to update InfoGripe, which depends on the SIVEP-Gripe data that the Ministry of Health sent us weekly, and the open datasus website itself remains down,” he said he, who explained that “any and all analysis system that depends on data from e-SUS Notifica (mild cases and positive tests, for example), SI-PNI (monitoring of vaccination), Sivep-Influenza (hospitalizations and deaths from respiratory infections), and SIM (deaths from all causes) that depend on the transfer of these data by the ministry or publication of these data on opendatasus have been compromised since then”.
In daily contact with members of the Ministry of Health, the Fiocruz researchers informed that there are still no perspectives for the situation to normalize and the bulletins and technical reports to be released again. According to them, this system crash for so long, as it happens now, is unprecedented.
Reference: CNN Brasil
