Dáil Éireann Debate, Tuesday - 7 July 2020
869. Deputy Róisín Shortall asked the Minister for Health the steps he will take to give effect to his agreement in Dáil Éireann on 30 June 2020 that all data held by his Department in respect of Covid-19 should be open source; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [14514/20]
View answerSince the National Public Health Emergency Team (NPHET) met for the first time, a commitment was given to collect and publish as much relevant data as possible while ensuring individual patient confidentiality was maintained at all times. While the nature and scale of the Covid-19 pandemic has been unprecedented, the collection of timely and comprehensive data has underpinned the efforts of the public health response to COVID-19 and has been instrumental in developing the health service response to Covid-19 and to the advice provided by NPHET and the Department of Health to assist Government decision-making in the wider response to Covid-19 in Ireland.
Aggregated data are published on an ongoing basis on my Department’s website, on the Health Protection Surveillance Centre website and on the HSE website. The Central Statistics office (CSO) also makes available a range of data through regular publications on its COVID -19 Information hub, detailing the changing state of aspects of Ireland's economy and society since the COVID-19 outbreak. The CSO has also provided the infrastructure for researcher access to data to allow further analysis through the provision of researcher Microdata files.
Furthermore, comprehensive national statistics, information and data about COVID-19 in Ireland is published on a daily basis on the Covid-19 Data Hub and Dashboards which can be accessed at http://www.gov.ie/covid19dashboard/. Data is also published on the open data portal at https://data.gov.ie/. This provides data in a machine readable format, updated on a daily basis and follows the Government guidelines on making data more widely available in open free and reusable formats.
It should be noted that due to the nature of the disease transmission and the clustered effects of the disease, many of the cases occur in relatively small communities where identification of individual patients could be an issue if appropriate measures are not taken to protect individual identities and their locations. The data published to date has been aggregated with this consideration in mind while also ensuring that data is made available in a timely and comprehensive manner to inform the Department and wider Government response but also to ensure the public are kept informed to the greatest extent possible.
There is also ongoing collaboration between my Department, the HPSC, HSE, the Office of the Government Chief Information Officer, the CSO, Ordnance Survey Ireland and many other institutions and agencies to improve the data collected and the availability of it on an ongoing basis. I would like to assure the Deputy of my Department's ongoing commitment to publish as much Covid-19 data on an ongoing basis as is practicable, relevant and appropriate.
