Coronavirus hospital data will now be sent to Trump administration instead of CDC

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Who’s going to be in charge? Jared? Stephen Miller?

My state will continue to compile data. I am going to assume some others won’t.
 
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I am sure Trump and his administration will apply the same level of transparency and honesty on this data as to other matters.

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I will withhold judgement until I see whether the information is continued to be made public. If not, I guess it will be up to independent press to garner information the best they can, as they do in regimes where a dictator controls information.
 
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The fact the administration is telling hospitals to not report to the National Healthcare Safety Network is just mind boggling. I would imagine that was electronic and was gathered from EHRs. It’s apparently a big thing.

https://www.cdc.gov/nhsn/index.html

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I’ve kind of run out of outrage at this point. Is it November yet?
 
I remember that early on in all of this, CDC was requiring that all testing results be sent only to them, which was then determined to be inadequate in the face of the volume. In that event, they were the only source of resultant information. There’s nothing sacred about CDC. It’s just one more bureaucracy. If I saw some kind of persuasive evidence that it’s more trustworthy than HHS, I might wonder about this, but so far it just seem like a shift from one bureaucracy to another.
 
Ridgerunner said:
There’s nothing sacred about CDC. It’s just one more bureaucracy. If I saw some kind of persuasive evidence that it’s more trustworthy than HHS, I might wonder about this, but so far it just seem like a shift from one bureaucracy to another.
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What is the alternative? What health surveillance infrastructure does HHS have? None. They don’t have anything.

They are simply taking the data so it can be manipulated.
 

“State and local public health departments are on the frontlines of our fight against the pandemic, and these new resources will help them build the testing and surveillance capabilities needed to beat the new threat we face.”

The funding will help the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) support public health initiatives and programs. The grant will allow the CDC to supplement an existing cooperative agreement to multiple states and local jurisdictions identified as having the highest number of reported COVID-19 cases, and jurisdictions with accelerating or rapidly accelerating COVID-19 cases.

The funding will support a range of activities including lab equipment, supplies, staffing, shipping, infection control, surge staffing, monitoring of individuals, and data management.

Additionally, the award will help the CDC supplement an existing agreement to state jurisdictions through the Emerging Infections Program (EIP) to enhance surveillance capabilities. Activities will include investigating and assessing the burden and severity of COVID-19, evaluating and determining risk factors and outcomes, and planning and implementing prevention strategies.
 
PaulinVA said:
What health surveillance infrastructure does HHS have? None. They don’t have anything.
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I don’t think HHS is unable to collect data from hospitals, which they do now anyway, and I would bet dollars to donuts they have at least one major relational database to keep track of information on.

Even the NYT and WaPo criticize CDC for its Covid failures. And when it comes to data, even the liberal Atlantic says CDC failed to keep accurate data.

 
Ridgerunner said:
I don’t think HHS is unable to collect data from hospitals, which they do now anyway, and I would bet dollars to donuts they have at least one major relational database to keep track of information on.
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I have created health care data models, and have been working with healthcare data for almost 20 years. The CDC mistake (and the states) was hopefully in reporting, not in storing the data.

By that I mean that they should have been storing Antigen test result numbers separately from Antibody test result numbers. They could report them together, making the assumption that a positive antibody test meant you were sick at some point and should be included in the sick total. I would have reported them separately, myself.

HHS isn’t just going to create a data model and start populating it immediately. So, maybe they were planning this for awhile. I don’t know.
 
It is incumbent upon governments to do those things and assign those tasks in ways that, to them, seems most effective. I can see why the administration would be less than fully impressed with the performance of CDC in all of this.
 
Ridgerunner said:
I can see why the administration would be less than fully impressed with the performance of CDC in all of this.
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I don’t disagree with the CDC performance, or at least the perception.

I’ve been in the position before where a group that handled a certain kind of data totally borked some ETL (Extraction, Transformation and Loading) transformations and we lost faith in them. There was a push to get this other ETL group, not familiar with the project or the data, to “do it right”. That always turns into a disaster.

It seems to always be better to reform or mitigate or rehabilitate the correct group than bring in another.
 
PaulinVA said:
It seems to always be better to reform or mitigate or rehabilitate the correct group than bring in another.
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Could be in some instances, but if ineptitude is sufficiently entrenched and difficult to get rid of, it is sometimes better to start fresh.
 
Ridgerunner said:
Could be in some instances, but if ineptitude is sufficiently entrenched and difficult to get rid of, it is sometimes better to start fresh.
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This isn’t just a spreadsheet emailed to some GS-10.

And, what I’ve read about isn’t ineptitude, it’s a lack of leadership. Now, you’re thinking I mean Trump, and I don’t.

As they set up the surveillance tables for Covid 19, they apparently didn’t model for antigen and antibody tests. Once that became known, the appropriate person should have created rules and published them to the hospitals and health departments.

It is disheartening. It’s the same case with the death reporting, and trying to recreate the rules of what’s a covid death and what isn’t when Medical Examiners have rules and procedures to determine that. The database should have handled the immediate, the proximal, the contributing causes and let the reporting group decide what to count as a covid death.
 
Ridgerunner said:
It is incumbent upon governments to do those things and assign those tasks in ways that, to them, seems most effective. I can see why the administration would be less than fully impressed with the performance of CDC in all of this.
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There was a good interview yesterday on PBS with one of the four previous CDC directors that all agreed that in all their years of experience they have never seen the CDC so politicized as it is now. In the past, the CDC was always seen as non-political, and it was respected for its independence from politics. But Trump has undermined that faith in all our non-political institutions and this is another example. Even if HHS did everything right, they have the appearance of being a political arm of the administration. (Think, for example, of the hated “HHS mandate” under Obama.) HHS is much more political than the CDC or the NIH or many of the other fine non-political science-based institutions that have been undermined by Trump.

“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” and bypassing the agency would “undermine our nation’s public health experts.”

“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.
 
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LeafByNiggle said:
In the past, the CDC was always seen as non-political,
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So was the FBI, the CIA, the IRS, the NIA, but we’ve seen that was only a false perception.

But in the CDC’s case, it might simply be ineptitude.
LeafByNiggle said:
He also said collecting and reporting public health data is a “core function of the CDC
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They failed, though, and even liberal publications like Atlantic, NYT and WaPo have said so.
 
Ridgerunner said:
But in the CDC’s case, it might simply be ineptitude.
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The CDC is respected by doctors as much as ever, and for good reason. There is nothing better. They didn’t suddenly become inept when they started reporting facts inconvenient to the administration.
 
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