News item:
The Trump Administration has mandated that hospitals sidestep the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and send critical information about COVID-19 hospitalizations and equipment to a different federal database.
From the start of the pandemic, the CDC has collected data on COVID-19 hospitalizations, availability of intensive care beds and personal protective equipment. But hospitals must now report that information to the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the CDC.
Reactions:
"It was very surprising — shocking even, I would say — for many of us to realize yesterday that we would be now required to report to HHS on [this new] platform." -- Dr. Cassandra Pierre, acting hospital epidemiologist at Boston Medical Center.
"I'm very surprised that we are being mandated to report into a parallel system when hospitals have gotten used to reporting into NHSN. It's adding burden at a time when hospitals again are now responding to the surge of COVID-19. The timing couldn't be worse, to be honest." -- Dr. Grace Lee, a pediatric infectious disease physician and associate chief medical officer at the Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford.
"Surveillance benefits from being integrated — to be able to see multiple data streams in the same place, to be able to be able to compare them. When they're captured by completely separate systems by completely separate agencies [...] it will be harder to make comparisons and to do the deeper analysis — trying to understand if, say, rising cases are contributing to rising hospitalizations or vice versa." -- Jennifer Nuzzo, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
"It's entirely unclear why the Trump Administration has asked states and hospitals to upend their reporting systems in the middle of a pandemic — in 48 hours nonetheless — without a single explanation as to why this new system is better or necessary. The Trump Administration is going to have to give a full justification for this, because until they do, it's hard to see how this step won't further sideline public health experts and obscure the severity of this crisis." -- Sen. Patty Murray D-WA).
The cover- up's already in progress:
On Wednesday, online pandemic dashboard COVID Exit Strategy noted that the CDC data it had been using to monitor ICU and hospital bed occupancy was no longer available. "Our hope is this loss of critical public health information is temporary," an update on the site reads. "HHS is instituting a new process for collecting information from hospitals. The aggregate data from that system should be made public."They have no plan -- zero! -- at the federal level to control and defeat the COVID pandemic. Their only concern is to try to scrub or hide the data from the public so they can force workers and students back into unsafe environments and goose the economy in a last ditch effort to re- elect the orange shitgibbon. It's a fool's mission, because COVID has to be under control before people feel they can re- enter economic and social life in a safe manner. Keeping people in the dark is only going to increase their anxiety about what's being hidden from them, and they'll make their feelings known come November 3.
But, this is COVID Donnie and his Republican sociopaths, and this is how they're going to try to lie and bully their way through this deadly pandemic.
BONUS: In other words --
They're not trying to keep us safe, they're preventing us from knowing how endangered we are.https://t.co/6pKq0ClCVo— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) July 15, 2020
