Researchers from the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz) and health technicians interviewed by CNN pointed out that one of the main health information systems on Covid-19 has been unstable and flawed for at least two months. The SIVEP Flu (Influenza Surveillance Information System), maintained by the Ministry of Health, has not been correctly updated throughout Brazil.
The problem is not related to the hacker attack on the Ministry of Health this Friday (10), but it raises a serious alert: according to researchers, the problem in the analysis and insertion of data means that the monitoring of the pandemic in Brazil is being done “in the dark”. THE CNN questioned the Ministry of Health and is awaiting a return.
SIVEP Influenza is used by epidemiological surveillance of states and municipalities to report cases of respiratory infections since H1N1 in 2009. Responsible for Monitora Covid-19, Fiocruz’s pandemic monitoring portal, researcher Christovam Barcellos said that many health departments of the country are mostly failing to report mild cases of Covid.
“We’re going to spend a few weeks or months ‘in the dark.’ There may be a new increase in incidence and we are not observing this from the data”, he stated.
According to Barcellos, the moment is crucial for the data to be well updated, as managers across the country are looking at the numbers to decide, for example, on the maintenance of the New Year’s Eve party.
“Brazil is in a positive moment of the pandemic, but it is important to look at the coming weeks with the best possible data quality. There are days when a city doesn’t record any Covid cases; in the other, it registers 1000. This is not how the virus behaves”, he warned.
Technicians heard by CNN said that reporting cases of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SRAG) is possible in SIVEP Influenza, but the process is very slow. There is, for example, a requirement to enter the lot number of the antigen test that a patient undergoes to know whether or not they have Covid-19.
There is also a complaint about the excessive bureaucracy in filling in data, and the assessment that the Ministry of Health has not yet managed to minimize the impact, at the end, of the system’s instabilities. “A doctor, at the end, needs to fill out four forms, supply several data at the same time. With this instability, the process takes even longer”, declared, under reservation, a state health manager.
InfoGripe’s coordinator, Marcelo Gomes, from Fiocruz, stated that there is a technical delay that hinders the analysis of the situation at the time of the pandemic when filling in the data.
“We now have a problem with monitoring several respiratory viruses. There is a point of system fatigue. The integration with the vaccination data is making the work, at the end, much slower”, he stated.
Hacker attack reveals data storage system is obsolete
The vice president of the National Council of Health Secretaries, Nésio Trindade, told the CNN that the health systems attacked by hackers this Friday (10) use the same pattern 15 years ago and are obsolete. “The data is stored as in 2004, an infrastructure thought of at that time, where there was no debate about the internet of things, about data security”, he said.
According to him, the fact that ConnectSus is offline raises suspicions, especially after the government announced the 5-day quarantine or the presentation of a vaccination certificate for travelers arriving in Brazil. “The Ministry of Health needs a new data strategy, that’s a fact, but the attack carried out today makes everything much more suspicious in relation to the criticisms that the vaccination document received,” he said.
Reference: CNN Brasil
