Supporting COVID-19 Disparity Investigations with Dynamically Adjusting Case Reporting Policies

ABSTRACT

Data access limitations have stifled COVID-19 disparity investigations in the United States. Though federal and state legislation permits publicly disseminating de-identified data, methods for de-identification, including a recently proposed dynamic policy approach to pandemic data sharing, remain unproved in their ability to support pandemic disparity studies. Thus, in this paper, we evaluate how such an approach enables timely, accurate, and fair disparity detection, with respect to potential adversaries with varying prior knowledge about the population. We show that, when considering reasonably enabled adversaries, dynamic policies support up to three times earlier disparity detection in partially synthetic data than data sharing policies derived from two current, public datasets. Using real-world COVID-19 data, we also show how granular date information, which dynamic policies were designed to share, improves disparity characterization. Our results highlight the potential of the dynamic policy approach to publish data that supports disparity investigations in current and future pandemics.