“Leak” from the Center for Hygiene and Epidemiology: A Secret Database of Coronavirus Cases Published in Minsk per Day

What do these numbers say?

A health worker from Minsk contacted the zerkalo.io website. He handed over to the editors a document containing urgent notifications of positive tests for COVID-19 received at the hygiene and epidemiology center of Minsk.

In total, the document contains more than three thousand cases, which epidemiologists registered in one day on October 7. We explain what these numbers mean and publish a "portrait of the sick person" based on the data from the capital.

What kind of document is it?

The document is called "Emergency_Numbers_of_07_10_2021," this is a table.

Medical professionals who work with coronavirus patients are required to send such notifications for every confirmed COVID-19 case. In the city center for hygiene and epidemiology, information is collected, systematized, and numbers are assigned to notifications.

Inside the document we received is information about each notice registered on October 7th. The personal data of the patients, information about the diagnosis, and the place where it was made are indicated. The source data of the document contains the same surname as that of the doctor-epidemiologist of the Minsk City Center of Hygiene and Epidemiology. Most likely, the document was created at this very center.

Is the document real?

We think so. Several doctors from different health organizations have confirmed this to us. They reported that the patients listed in the table did indeed receive treatment at their facility and tested positive for COVID-19.

We also contacted several patients whose names are on the list. They confirmed that they had been tested for the coronavirus and the result was positive. In addition, we received data on the total number of emergency notifications for 12 days in September and October - the numbers from different sources coincided.

How many people are sick?

The table for October 7 contains information on 3089 emergency notifications for 3076 patients. The information was received from 83 Minsk health organizations - polyclinics, hospitals, Republican Scientific and Practical Center, medical centers.

There were slightly more notifications than patients. In 13 cases, there were two records with the same information per patient at once. In each case of "duplication," one person was registered either in two medical institutions or in two district centers of epidemiology. This can probably be attributed to technical errors.

In almost all patients, the table indicates the primary diagnosis of "unspecified coronavirus infection (laboratory confirmed)." Two have “SARS-COV-2 viral pneumonia.”

According to sources from Zerkalo.io, there were these many urgent notifications in Minsk for the period from September 29 to October 10:

Is the Ministry of Health lying in its daily reports?

We cannot say this unequivocally. The Ministry of Health publishes official data on the number of COVID-19 cases in Belarus every day on the Telegram channel. This figure has never exceeded 2,000 so far. But there are important nuances.

In the summaries of the department, they write as follows: "in a day ... patients with COVID-19 were registered in the Republic of Belarus." We do not know at what point the sick person is “registered”: it may be the moment of receiving a positive test result for COVID-19, the moment of transferring data about him to the center of hygiene and epidemiology, or the moment of transferring information to the Ministry of Health. All of this can happen on different days and affect the numbers on a particular date. We asked the Ministry of Health on what principle they form daily reports, but we have not yet been answered.

The data we received are all cases of confirmed COVID-19 that were registered at the Minsk Center for Hygiene and Epidemiology on specific days. At the same time, some patients were diagnosed on the same day, and some earlier.

Therefore, we cannot directly compare the data obtained with the figures of the Ministry of Health - we do not have enough methodology for calculating cases by the Ministry.

Official data from the Ministry of Health throughout Belarus, in comparison with the numbers we received, looks like this:

How many died?

The October 7 document contains information about one death. A 50-year-old patient contacted doctors on September 30; on the same day, she was given a primary diagnosis of "coronavirus infection, unspecified (laboratory-confirmed)" and was admitted to the hospital. The disease was severe. The very next day - October 1 - the woman died. In the document, she was indicated as unemployed, she was not vaccinated against COVID-19.

The patient was finally diagnosed with coronavirus infection only a week later, on October 7. On the same day, her case was registered at the city center for hygiene and epidemiology.

We have no data on the dead on other days.

Who is sick now?

The table for October 7 contains not only diagnoses but also information about the health and treatment of each of the patients. Anonymized data on 3,076 Minsk residents, who are we got to the database, allow us to draw up an approximate "portrait of a sick person" for Minsk.

Gender. 60% of all patients in the document are women, 40% are men.

Age. Approximately one in three is over 50 years old. The oldest patient is 95 years old, this is a woman born in 1926. Judging by the document, she is ill in a mild form, she was not hospitalized.

Children. There are 210 minors in the table, 9 of them are one-year-old children, 11 are children under a year old. The youngest patient was born in September 2021, now less than three weeks old. She has a moderate illness and has been hospitalized.

Vaccination. Of the 3086 cases, 2,906 are not vaccinated (94% of the total), 40 are vaccinated (approximately 1% of the total). Another 35 have not yet reached the age of vaccination, seven have not completed the course of vaccination, one refused to be vaccinated, and one more patient has contraindications. There is no vaccination data for 86 patients.

Place of work. In some patients, the main place of work is indicated. Judging by the table, COVID-19 was detected in employees of completely different institutions: universities, colleges, schools, kindergartens, shops, hotels, airports, catering establishments, healthcare institutions, transport, IT companies, factories, banks, law enforcement agencies. Epidemiologists registered 96 employees of secondary schools alone per day.

Outbreaks of the disease. The data allows us to find out which places have more sick people than others. For example, from some schools, epidemiologists received information about 5-6 sick workers and students at once. At one of the Minsk factories, 15 employees with COVID-19 were registered per day. Six large Minsk universities have 47, 23, 23, 18, 16, and 14 cases each, which epidemiologists learned about on October 7.