The low quality of COVID-19’s epidemiological surveillance data in Portugal limits its use in research and even in making “good decisions” in the field of Public Health, which may compromise the control of the current pandemic.
The alert comes from a study developed by a group of researchers from CINTESIS – Center for Health Technology and Services Research and the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Porto (FMUP) .
The study, entitled “COVID-19 surveillance – a descriptive study on data quality issues”, has been published in the scientific journal medRxiv. The researchers analyzed the data made available by the Directorate-General for Health (DGS) in April and August this year, following the calls that they themselves made for the databases to be made public.
The results point to the existence of “significant inconsistencies”, namely between the numbers of cases and deaths by COVID-19 released daily.
The team also detected other problems, such as differences between the variables used and the absence of a significant number of data. According to these scientists, more than four thousand cases that were part of the data made available by the DGS in April are not included in the update made by the DGS in August.
“There is an urgent need to improve epidemiological surveillance data, for example, by simplifying the data entry process, constant monitoring and greater training and awareness of health professionals”, indicate the researchers.
The study is authored by Cristina Costa-Santos, Ana Luísa Neves, Ricardo Correia, Paulo Santos, Matilde Monteiro-Soares, Alberto Freitas, Inês Ribeiro-Vaz, Teresa Henriques, Pedro Pereira Rodrigues, Altamiro da Costa Pereira, Ana Margarida Pereira and João Fonseca.