Videos Of Covid-19 (Coronavirus) Patients Against Confidentiality

One of the fundamental patient rights is confidentiality. Patient confidentiality is the right an individual has to personal identifiable medical information kept private. Information about a patient is only accessible to the patient's physician. Third parties access to the data is subject to approval from the patient.

Covid-19 patient

The reason for such a right is to protect the patient. Some patients suffer harm when the wrong person gets to know their medical information. For example, human immune virus (HIV)/Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) victims face stigma from the public. Disclosing the identity of HIV/AIDS victims can lead to stigma which can lead to loss of job. In worse scenario suicide can occur.
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However, medical personnel can share information about a patient's conditions among themselves or to the general public. The patient demographic such as name, address, phone number and other identifiable data are eliminated or changed. This helps to protect patient privacy. For example, I can refer to a patient as patient X. The name of the patient is not important to others. What is important is the disease condition. Others may learn from it.

There is a general clamour by some groups of persons in Nigeria to publish videos or pictures of covid-19 patients. They claim that other countries publish videos of their patient. Their reasons make sense. But looking at it from another angle, it is a futile mission to please these ones. The law is the law. It cannot be bent because of some individuals.

Those countries they mention never publish videos or pictures of covid-19 patients in their countries. When the virus started in most of those countries, many of their citizens also doubted the virus and its capability to inflict pains on the public. Even the president of the United States of America (USA) made mockery remarks about the infection.

However, as time went on their hospital was overwhelmed with many cases. There was panic and chaos everywhere. Nobody bothers about the law anymore. Patients visiting hospitals started to film covid-19 patients in their hospital beds dying. They shared them on social media to the public to see and learn. However, most of those videos and pictures were never done by health care workers. Health care workers that did never attach their title to such videos or pictures.
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Presently, various covid-19 survivors have shared testimonies of how they survive it. There are a couple of videos of Nigerian cases online. This is in addition to hundreds from other countries. Those clamouring for video or pictorial evidence see these but out of ignorance choose to ignore. They want to see videos of covid-19 patients in hospital dying or suffering. Provide them with these and they will still be looking for faults with the videos and pictures. They will only accept the fact that the virus is here and is ravaging the country when they see a person they know develop symptoms that refuse to subside after trying to treat them locally. We hope we will not get to that extent before a tangible solution is found.

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