Is this the work of the US CDC and other visitors helping the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) Ministry of Health (MOH) resolve their Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) problem? Is it an arbitrary reporting change by the Command and Control Center (CCC)? Is it someone forgetting to unhide the relevant columns in their spreadsheet?
I don't know why, but since 17th March, the KSA MOH MERS-CoV reports have stopped posting information about whether each newly announced MERS case had a comorbidity and whether they had animal contact. Granted, the last field was almost always "No" or "Under Investigation" - and thus of little use (we rely almost exclusively on the World Health Organization reports to provide useful animal data) - but I wonder why the MOH has chosen to stop posting even the heading this month?
The much more epidemiologically significant description of whether the case was an "expat" or a "Saudi" citizen remains - whew!
And the MOH has continued to do away with all of that pesky detail that might allow an observer to link a death to a previously announced case. Thank goodness we don't have that clutter to deal with - or the details from the found113 which I presume are now completely lost in the sands of time.
I guess the removal of these latest 2 data fields is just all part of providing the world with more of that full transparency and up-to-date information about this emerging pathogen - like the MOH "News" page - all the latest info you could want from August and earlier is to be found there.
Oh well, at least you can get the latest from the weekly updates...if Google Translate's efforts can be understood.
It really isn't as hard as it is being made to look to get the reporting aspects right.
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Changes to the KSA MOH MERS-CoV public reporting detail after 17-March-2015. 1. The MERS-CoV graph changed scale and caught up. 2. Three fields disappeared: pre-existing disease, animal exposure and contact with a known cases within a hospital setting 3. The promise of weekly updates was dangled- without reference to a host site. Click on image to enlarge. |
I don't know why, but since 17th March, the KSA MOH MERS-CoV reports have stopped posting information about whether each newly announced MERS case had a comorbidity and whether they had animal contact. Granted, the last field was almost always "No" or "Under Investigation" - and thus of little use (we rely almost exclusively on the World Health Organization reports to provide useful animal data) - but I wonder why the MOH has chosen to stop posting even the heading this month?
The much more epidemiologically significant description of whether the case was an "expat" or a "Saudi" citizen remains - whew!
And the MOH has continued to do away with all of that pesky detail that might allow an observer to link a death to a previously announced case. Thank goodness we don't have that clutter to deal with - or the details from the found113 which I presume are now completely lost in the sands of time.
I guess the removal of these latest 2 data fields is just all part of providing the world with more of that full transparency and up-to-date information about this emerging pathogen - like the MOH "News" page - all the latest info you could want from August and earlier is to be found there.
Oh well, at least you can get the latest from the weekly updates...if Google Translate's efforts can be understood.
It really isn't as hard as it is being made to look to get the reporting aspects right.
