Alarm bells ring for patient data and privacy in the covid-19 goldrush

ABSTRACT

Patient data are being used on an unprecedented scale by governments and healthcare bodies to stop the pandemic in its tracks. But what of the long term effects of accessing such sensitive information, asks David Cox Among the few success stories of the covid-19 pandemic has been how South Korea remarkably stopped its outbreak at just under 11 000 cases and with no lockdown. Its mass testing has been lauded, but equally key was extensive tracing—and surveillance—of its citizens that would prove uncomfortable in other nations. Korea’s containment is in part thanks to a sophisticated network of GPS trackers linked to people’s smartphones, as well as access to electronic records such as credit card purchases that allowed the tracking and tracing of every individual’s movements, right down to what buses they rode or shops they visited. The system issues alerts to the public, phones buzzing whenever an infectious person is in the area or a citizen has crossed the path of someone who has tested positive, urging them to get tested themselves and to self-isolate.1 The government even started issuing tracking wristbands to stop people dodging quarantine by leaving their phones at home.2 In Asia, bad memories of the SARS, H1N1, and MERS outbreaks have influenced public perspectives on how the government uses and shares their data. “The social shock of MERS in Korea was intense because the Middle East is quite a distant place psychologically as well as geographically,” says Youngkee Ju, who researches the dynamics of risk perception at Hallym University in Chuncheon, South Korea. Ju said that, in one unpublished survey his team conducted between February and April 2020, 68.2% of the respondents preferred maintaining the current level of information sharing even if it sacrificed individual right to privacy. A similar trend was seen in a …