Hospitals to send virus data to Washington
Health experts alarmed as Trump bypasses CDC
The Trump administration ordered hospitals on Wednesday to bypass the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and send all COVID-19 patient information to a central database in Washington, according to a Health and Human Services document updated July 10.
Michael Caputo, HHS assistant secretary for public affairs, said in a statement that the new coronavirus data collection system would be “faster,” adding that the CDC has a one-week lag in reporting hospital data.
“The president’s Coronavirus Task Force has urged improvements for months, but they cannot keep up with this pandemic,” Caputo said. “Today, the CDC still provides data from only 85% of hospitals; the president’s COVID response requires 100% to report.”
Caputo added: “The CDC, an operating division of HHS, will certainly participate in this streamlined all-of-government response. They will simply no longer control it.”
Wednesday afternoon, CDC Director Robert Redfield described the data collection system as a way to streamline the process and make it easier for the nation’s hospitals to get information to state and federal authorities.
Nonetheless, public health experts and infectious-disease scientists are sounding an alarm on the new protocols, noting that further politicization of this pandemic will hurt frontline workers and patients.
“Placing medical data collection outside of the leadership of public health experts could severely weaken the quality and availability of data, add an additional burden to already overwhelmed hospitals and add a new challenge to the U.S. pandemic response,” Dr. Thomas File, president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, said in a statement. He also said collecting and reporting public health data is a “core function of the CDC.”
“As infectious diseases physicians, front-line providers and scientists, we urge the administration to follow public health expertise in addressing this public health crisis,” File said.
The news follows a Tuesday Washington Post op-ed written by four former CDC directors or acting directors criticizing President Donald Trump for “politicizing science.”
“These repeated efforts to subvert sound public health guidelines introduce chaos ... while unnecessarily putting lives at risk,” they wrote.
During a video meeting Wednesday with the USA TODAY editorial board, one of the authors, former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. David Satcher, called sidelining the agency “very scary” and saying, “Somehow we’ve got to get past the conflict (between the White House and the CDC) in the interest of saving lives.”
As of Wednesday, the U.S. has surpassed 3.4 million cases with more than 136,000 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University’s coronavirus dashboard.