Ontario needs to be more transparent with COVID-19 data, critics say - CBC.ca

On Wednesday, Toronto Public Health bowed to public pressure and released COVID case numbers for all of the city's postal codes — information that may well spur more residents to get tested.

"The province's unwillingness and inability to collect the appropriate data, and in turn share it with the public, and public health units, is hindering our response to COVID-19," said Joe Cressy, a Toronto city councillor and chair of the Board of Health.

Andrew Morris, an infectious disease specialist at Toronto's Sinai Health and University Health Network.

"If we don't have that information, we don't really have a good idea of the best ways for us to approach it?

Part of the problem, Morris said, are "archaic" systems that don't allow hospitals, regional health authorities and the province to readily and easily share and analyze the data they have on hand.

"I think a lot of this relates to the chronic under-funding of public health in Ontario," said Morris.

Our public health infrastructure has really not ramped up to the level that we've needed to.".

Even the flow of basic information between the province and its 32 public health units is complicated.

For example, Ontario's daily COVID update pulls together information from four different databases — the provincial integrated Public Health Information System (iPHIS), which dates back to the early 2000s, as well as newer, municipally run reporting systems in Toronto, Ottawa and Middlesex-London.

As a result, many local health regions say they don't know how many tests they have performed, and can only disclose how many positive results have come back.

The way that news of positive tests is shared with public health officials depends on which lab or hospital has processed the swab.

A Toronto Public Health spokesperson told CBC that it has been receiving lab reports through a variety of ways: electronically, by phone, fax, even through the mail. .

As of Wednesday, Peel, York, Ottawa, Durham, Waterloo and Windsor-Essex County followed Toronto as regions with the greatest number of COVID cases. .

CBC News canvassed these additional six public health units to determine recent counts of COVID-19 swab testing?

While each unit publishes detailed COVID-19 updates online, York Region Public Health Services, Windsor-Essex County Health Unit and Ottawa Public Health are the only regions in the group that publish daily testing numbers.

Then there's South Korea, where the government has been providing the public with detailed information on where novel coronavirus patients reside, so they can steer clear of specific streets or neighbourhoods.

Bron acknowledged that governments have been forced to improvise during the crisis but said that shouldn't be an excuse for obscuring information that could be ultimately useful for public health.

There are worries about the consequences of too little information as the COVID outbreak grinds on. Morris pointed to a recent mass gathering in a Toronto park as evidence that the public might be at risk of losing the COVID plot.