BASSETERRE, St.Kitts (Friday 17th April 2020) – The gender, age and race details of individuals who test positive for COVID-19 will no longer be made public as part of the regular situation report by the local medical team in St. Kitts-Nevis.
Medical Chief of Staff at the Joseph N. France General Hospital Dr. Cameron Wilkinson explained the decision, citing the protection of patient privacy in a small society.
“Going forward, we would not be giving all that information because first and foremost we have to think about persons' confidentiality, and we live in a small community. People know persons and so when you give a significant amount of information as it relates to the race, the age, the gender, persons have been tracking down persons and doing some of the worst things that you'd not expect people to be doing in an epidemic like this; putting persons' pictures on Facebook,” said Dr. Wilkinson.
He noted that going forward, aggregated data by age, sex and trends would be released periodically rather than per-case details.