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Why will only the Accademia dei Lincei have the true Covid data?

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Why will only the Accademia dei Lincei have the true Covid data?

After the solicitation of the scientific community (including the Luca Coscioni Association, the Gimbe Foundation and the Accademia dei Lincei), the ISS signs an agreement on the data collected on the Covid pandemic in Italy but only with the Lincei

All Covid data collected and processed so far in Italy finally available, but only for a scientific academy.

In fact, the collaboration between the Istituto Superiore di Sanità (Iss) and the Accademia dei Lincei is underway "to develop models that analyze the trend of the epidemic and the impact on the national health system". The agreement signed by the two institutions provides for this, on the basis of which the ISS makes the collected data available to the Academy's experts, reads the note released on 11 November .

The sharing of epidemic monitoring data had already been requested 8 months ago by the Italian scientific community. In particular from the Luca Coscioni Association, the Italian Statistical Society, the Gimbe Foundation and the Accademia dei Lincei.

So much so that at the beginning of the month the leader of the Luca Coscioni Association, Marco Cappato, welcomed the decision of the Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte "to have asked the ISS to share the monitoring data and that they be accessible to the scientific community and to all the citizens". “We hope that the ISS will immediately follow up, but not the aggregate data and in closed format,” specified Cappato. "But all the data disaggregated and in an open format, so as to allow autonomous and independent processing and analysis".

Yet yesterday the ISS signed an agreement on Covid data exclusively with the Lincei at the moment.

All the details.

THE AGREEMENT BETWEEN ISS AND ACCADEMIA DEI LINCEI

The agreement between Iss and Accademia dei Lincei will last for one year. The agreement provides for the two institutions to collaborate in the estimates of the generation time of the epidemic and the reproduction number (Rt), with a monitoring of the trend of these variables over time. Transmission models are also expected to be produced to estimate the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the health system.

BRUSAFERRO (ISS): "DATA TO AN AUTHORITATIVE AND PRESTIGIOUS INSTITUTION"

“I firmly believe in the importance of making data available to the scientific community and I am particularly pleased if this happens with an authoritative and prestigious institution such as the Accademia dei Lincei”, declared the president of the ISS, Silvio Brusaferro.

PARISI: A COORDINATED EFFORT OF THE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY IS NEEDED

"We are in a situation in which we do not yet know with certainty which are the most relevant channels for the spread of the virus", declared the president of the Lincei, Giorgio Parisi. For this, he added, "a great coordinated effort by the scientific community is needed to reach a greater understanding of the mechanisms of contagion and this agreement is an important step in this direction".

Coordinated effort of the scientific community then, but how if the data are not public and “open” for all researchers and scientific institutes?

PUBLIC DATA ALSO WANTED BY PARISI

Parisi himself just the day before the announcement of the agreement had declared: “The swabs and contact tracing can give us very detailed information, they are fundamental for the construction of a scientific model to understand the effects of the measures taken. But the data must be public, ”he said on Tuesday 10 November at a hearing in the Senate Hygiene and Health Committee on the use of tests and tracking for the containment of the Covid-19 pandemic. “It is not possible for fundamental data to appear in the newspapers and not to be provided in the clear by the institutions. It is surprising that the scientific community has to register on the Economist to have the data of the Lombard municipalities ”, added the president of the Accademia dei Lincei.

During the hearing, Parisi also recalled how the Covid commission of the Accademia dei Lincei at the beginning of June had written a document asking that "the regional health institutions, the ISS and the Civil Protection plan to share data agreed with the scientific community "because in the absence of transparency," every conclusion becomes contestable on the scientific level and, therefore, also on the political level ".

Sharing of data that currently takes place by the ISS only with the Academy chaired by Parisi therefore.

THE POLEMIC

The sharing of Covid data was also discussed last night at half past eight , the program conducted by Lilli Gruber on La7.

“The data must be made public, in its various forms, therefore disaggregated by territory, with high spatial resolution, disaggregated by age classes”, claimed epidemic Vittoria Colizza (Director of Research INSERM).

Undersecretary for Health Sandra Zampa said: “Agenas has these data, and the data is published every day, in whatever way. We publish all the data every day ”.

But “data must be open data, open, usable by everyone”, replied Stefano Feltri, director of Domani: “There is a petition launched by the Gimbe foundation for example and signed by many scientists asking for just this. What is needed is the most disaggregated data possible, it is not true that the data are public ”.

THE REQUEST OF THE GIMBE FOUNDATION

The Gimbe foundation has returned to ask the government to make all previous reports public and to make the database accessible in open data format, with the modification of the data license of the Ministry of Health. As reported by the president of Gimbe, Nino Cartabellotta, during an informal hearing at the XII Social Affairs Commission of the Chamber on 10 November.

THE TWEET OF ANDREA PRESBITERO (ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ECONOMICS AT JOHN HOPKINS)

This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/sanita/perche-i-veri-dati-covid-li-avra-solo-laccademia-dei-lincei/ on Thu, 12 Nov 2020 15:25:50 +0000.