Table.

Privacy characteristics used to create datasets and how they differ between the public-use and scientific-use datasets, developed in 2020 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for design of 2 public datasets for COVID-19 case surveillance

Variable	Definition	Public-use dataset	Scientific-use dataset
No. of fields	Total fields	11	31
Privacy threshold	Minimum acceptable value for privacy calculations. K is the threshold for k-anonymity; l is the threshold for l-diversity.	k = 5 [minimum allowed records sharing quasi-identifier values] l = 2 [minimum allowed values of confidential fields by records sharing quasi-identifier values]	k = 5 [minimum allowed records sharing quasi-identifier values] l = 2 [minimum allowed values of confidential fields by records sharing quasi-identifier values]
Quasi-identifier fields	Dataset fields that may identify individuals	sex [sex] age_group [age group] race_ethnicity_combined [race and ethnicity]	sex [sex] age_group [age group] race_ethnicity_combined [race and ethnicity] res_county [county of residence] res_state [state of residence] hc_work_yn [health care worker status]
Confidential fields	Dataset fields that do not identify individuals but contain confidential information	pos_spec_dt [date of first positive specimen]	pos_spec_dt [date of first positive specimen]