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 while appearing on a special edition of National Emergency Operations Center (NEOC) COVID-19 Daily Briefing on Wednesday 15th April 2020 explained why citing the protection of patient privacy in a small society in which he also touched on social media tracking.
“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. When I lived in the United States, I take off my white jacket and step outside of the hospital and no one knew me; I just another person walking in the street. Here, in this very small environment that we live, 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 etc. sometimes they’ve put the wrong picture. Now what are we to do, call and say or that is the wrong person so that when they have the right person we say you have the right persons?”
Dr. Wilkinson noted: “And so we need to protect persons’ confidentiality. When you get the figures out of Italy, New York etc., you get a number; you don’t get any details as it was a black man aged 25 living in Harlem.”
He then highlighted the way forward on the matter saying “what we would do in time is to provide the data so that persons can look at the [trends] and so maybe at the end of a month etc. we’ll say the 14 cases, they were divided by age, sex etc. so that persons can look at the [trends] .in trying to protect persons confidentiality.”
“For all those persons out there who are yes we should give their information out , you would say yes until it is you, until it is your mother, until it is your father, and sometimes persons only understand the severity of a situation when it touches home but we need to protect every single one. I know exactly what some of these persons went through when persons tracked them down …and we need to protect them; we need to look out for everyone,” he further noted.