MINSK, 8 April (BelTA) – The Belarusian Healthcare Ministry does not provide information about COVID-19 cases in Belarus by district because of unwelcome attention to coronavirus patients, Healthcare Minister Vladimir Karanik said during a live stream on the Youtube channel of the National Press Center on 8 April, BelTA has learned.
The minister explained why the Healthcare Ministry stopped providing the regional breakdown of COVID-19 cases. “We have witnessed unwelcome attention and attempts to visit one or another district and invade the privacy of people with coronavirus, make them public,” Vladimir Karanik said. This hinders work of medical staff. “People decide not to seek medical attention and hide their contacts,” he noted. “In view of the current epidemiological situation, unnecessary visits to hotbeds of the infection are not advisable either,” the minister added.
Vladimir Karanik assumed that it may come to the point when some might ask healthcare workers to reveal addresses of infected people. The minister pointed out that the very fact of someone seeking medical assistance falls under the law on patient confidentiality.
The Healthcare Ministry publishes the statistics on coronavirus cases in the whole country to inform people about the situation in general. “Agencies that need this information to make managerial decisions receive the detailed statistics,” Vladimir Karanik stressed.
