In a nutshell: Why CORONA-CoV data from Saudi Arabia is often limited....

From a Q&A with Dr Ziad Memish, Deputy Health Minister for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia written up by Ellen Knickmeyer of the Wall Street Journal...

“I know that there are some newspapers and news agencies requesting more detailed information. As a public-health officer, I feel strongly this is not acceptable. The news media is not the place to detail the critical information about patients or how many people in the same family got infected, or where they live.

Speaks for itself really.

It does somewhat miss the point of what many have been asking for (including me). The data would obviously have to be deidentified. A standard practice in for research epidemiology publications and a frequent (usual?) requirement by ethical panels that approve your projects. At least in some States. That would mean leaving out patient and family names (as has been happening to date with CORONA, but not so much with COVID-19 where too much private information was shared), hospital names and any household addresses.

His subsequent comments outline Dr Memish's view of a minimal publicly available dataset...

What needs to be given to the public is positive case, the age, the sex, the location and if there’s anything unusual about increased spread or a new event that has not been reported in the past.

This doesn't explain why it take so long to hear of a CORONA-CoV death when the KSA has a daily-updated (at 5pm!), coronavirus-specific, public health announcement website. Presumably testing is slower than we thought or samples are not being collected for CORONA-CoV testing often enough? Who knows? It also doesn't explain why data content varies from post-to-post.

Despite this, and I agree that patient details should be kept private, my list of details to help out global public health officials, amended from an posted earlier, is...

1. A unique, continuous identifying code specific to this emerging virus
2. Sex
3. Age
4. Possible exposures Occupation
5. Co-morbidities
6. Date of illness onset
7. Town of illness onset [for internal and collaborative investigation]
8. Town of acquisition acquisition [for internal and collaborative investigation]
9. Date of hospitalisation
10. Type of laboratory testing
11. Date of laboratory confirmation
12. Date of death
13. Date of release from hospital
14. Treatments/management
15. Town of treatment [for internal and collaborative investigation]
16. Relationships to any other cases

Why one watches the webs for the worst of the woes...

In an article on BAYTODAY.CA,written by @HelenBranswell, there is a fantastic quote that really defines why infectious disease bloggers, and public health professionals working through more official channels, get all fired up when they cannot have or find, information that could be used to help monitor or understand disease outbreaks. 

"We breathe the same air. We drink the same water. We fly on the same planes. And an infectious disease outbreak anywhere is a potential risk and threat to all of us," said Dr. Martin Cetron, director of the center for global immigration and quarantine at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.

"And we just have to constantly pay attention and stay vigilant."

The influenza Covid-19 death in Canada has and continues to generate a huge amount of interest. It's also generating no small amount of confusion over how the infection was acquired by this late 20-something East Asian female who worked in healthcare at Red Deer Regional Hospital. Apart from that, this infection also highlighted that when many eyes focus on a case, it is very difficult to keep a patient's details, work, travel routes and trip details, secret for long. 

Does intentionally withholding any or all of age, sex, date of onset, date of hospitalization, and perhaps a few other deidentified details truly hinder a globally connected world's efforts to uncover these details? Seems not. Whether those details hinder a patient's ability to remain anonymous I cannot say; I said other things about that recently though.

In the meantime, interested and involved professionals and amateurs alike use what information they have to hand to bend their minds towards seeking answers and making comments that might help solve mysteries like this. Because they try to help. For the benefit of all of us. I suspect, regardless of the communicative devices available to them and the extent of the interconnectedness in which they abided at the time, they always have and they always will.