The hospital mistake revealed data from Bolsonaro and another 16 million patients



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An employee of a prestigious private hospital in Sao Paulo has mistakenly exposed the data of Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, and another 16 million patients suspected or confirmed by covid-19, the Estadão newspaper reported Thursday.

The personal and health information of those affected was made publicly available for nearly a month after an employee hired by Albert Einstein Hospital released a list of users and their passwords on a platform to access the Ministry of Health’s systems.

This revealed data from millions of patients from Brazil’s 27 federative units, including Bolsonaro, who contracted the novel coronavirus last July and recovered at the end of that month, and that of some of his family members.

Among the patients who have had their privacy exposed are seven ministers of state and seventeen regional governors, in addition to the presidents of the Chamber of Deputies, Rodrigo Maia, and of the Senate, Davi Alcolumbre, who also contracted covid-19.

Failure to intervene made it possible to filter the addresses, telephone numbers and previous pathologies of these 16 million people, whose information was contained in two databases of the Ministry of Health.

In the first, called E-SUS-VE, suspected and confirmed cases of the new coronavirus are reported, when the patient’s state of health is mild or moderate; and the second, Sivep-flu, includes hospitalizations for severe acute respiratory syndromes.

The Estadão newspaper learned of the incident through a complaint that included a link to the “github” platform, where users and passwords for accessing the Ministry’s database were located, in a message published on October 28 by employee Albert Einstein.

“Github” is a tool that computer programmers use to store codes and files.

Albert Einstein hospital today acknowledged, in a statement, that the employee in question “had stored information on access to certain systems” from the Ministry of Health “without adequate protection”, and therefore decided to fire him.

“The information was immediately removed and the fact communicated to the Ministry of Health so that it could take measures to ensure data protection,” he added.

Brazil is the Portuguese-speaking country most affected by the pandemic and one of the most affected in the world, with the second largest number of deaths (over 6.1 million cases and 170,769 deaths), after the United States.

After about two months in a regressive phase, cases and hospitalizations for covid-19 have grown again in different regions of the country and some epidemiology experts are already talking about a second wave, even if the country has not definitively abandoned the first.

The covid-19 pandemic has caused at least 1,422,951 deaths resulting from more than 60.4 million cases of the infection worldwide, according to a report by the French agency AFP.

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