A Brazilian investigative news site, Pública, is an invaluable resource for data in a difficult country. A June 9 report: Na trincheira contra o apagão de dados da pandemia. This excerpt from the Google translation has links to several other Brazilian sites with good information:
Last Friday (6/6), the Ministry of Health (MS) portal with data on the coronavirus pandemic in the country was down. The site only returned to work the following day, showing only the cases registered on the day - the total number of deaths and contaminated by the disease and the history of the data were left out. On Monday, the agency announced that it will re-publish the information taken down, but will continue to highlight the figures for the past 24 hours.
In response, civil society initiatives to disseminate data omitted by the government were intensified: data repository, bulletins and panels with the numbers of the disease. Even major media outlets have announced a partnership to release full numbers on the new coronavirus in Brazil.
The Brazil IO , public data repository founded in 2018, offers a historic number of confirmed cases and deaths by municipality since the pandemic began in March. After the Ministry of Health stopped publishing the complete data, they also did - with a team of 40 volunteers - a daily bulletin of cases of the disease. Álvaro Justen, founder of the website, says that he realized in March that “I couldn't count on the Ministry of Health”. At the time, at the beginning of the pandemic, the agency's website was down for a week.
“The Ministry of Health had aggregated information by state, but not by municipality. Furthermore, information by state was out of date in relation to the health departments of some states ”, complains journalist Marcelo Soares, founder of Lagom Data - a company that provides data collection and analysis services. That is why, still in March, he decided to set up a methodology for updating the number of coronavirus cases according to the data from the state departments.
Another initiative is the Covid-19 Monitor, which concentrates in one portal news about the situation of the pandemic in the country, focusing on regional information. “I wanted to find in one place the most segmented and reliable information, which is from state governments and health departments”, says the founder, Fábio Rehm. “At the federal level, I don't see much happening with the pandemic. There is always something else deviating the focus,” he criticizes.
Tatiana Portella, from Covid Observatory19 - an independent initiative by researchers - says that in addition to the incomplete data and the instability of the Ministry of Health website, the group finds “inconsistencies in the data from the national databases” that are being investigated. The project makes mathematical projections on the evolution of the pandemic based on data collected from the state health departments.
"We know that denying the facts and hiding the data is a modus operandi"
For the experts, the changes now reveal more clearly the deliberate intention of the federal government to hide data. "All the evidence shows that the data was taken because someone did not want to put the complete data," argues Justen.
He explains that the site has undergone changes only in the interface - that is, in the part that appears to the user - but and continues to collect the complete data. “It was clearly a way of getting the information out so that lay people cannot read it.” Become an ally of Pública How about participating in the fight against fake news about coronavirus?
For Fernanda Campagnucci, director of Open Knowledge Brasil, an organization that promotes transparency and free knowledge, the federal government is hiding the data to avoid criticism. "It is a way to make up the situation even to make it look as if it is less serious than it is."
