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So a big uproar about something that hasn't happen yet. I still would like a quote from someone at HHS that explains this in detail.
We've been posting links all last night and this morning. See Caputo's comments below.
Trump Administration To Hospitals: Don’t Send Covid-19 Coronavirus Data To CDC
This announcement, if you can call a document, quietly appeared on a web site as an announcement.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has issued a frequented asked questions (FAQ) document to hospitals and similar facilities on how they should report their Covid-19-related data. And one thing that’s clear from document. It’s no longer going to be as easy as CDC.
Nope, the document includes the following statement:
“As of July 15,, 2020, hospitals should no longer report the Covid-19 information in this document to the National Healthcare Safety Network site. Please select one of the above methods to use instead.”
The “above methods” are basically four different variations of “send it to HHS instead.”
All of these methods essentially bypass the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) National Healthcare Safety Network, which has long been the nation’s healthcare-associated infection tracking system. It is not perfect but has been by far the most comprehensive method of tracking infectious disease cases in health care facilities across the country. This network already has a Covid-19 module that includes a dash board where you can see such things as a snapshot of current hospital capacity estimates and the percentage of inpatient beds occupied by Covid-19 patients – Change in 14 Day Period.
So now HHS is telling hospitals to report data such as hospital inpatient bed occupancy, mechanical ventilators in use, number of suspected or confirmed Covid-19 cases, and N95 masks available directly to HHS. Or at least through their states to HHS. But not to CDC.
So with this backdrop, there have been concerns that this new HHS requirement may be a way of controlling the data and information that scientists, public health experts, and the public can access.
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COVID-19 hospital data will be sent to DC instead of CDC, HHS confirms
Michael Caputo, the assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of HHS, confirmed the change first reported by The New York Times earlier in the day, saying in a statement that the “new faster and complete data system is what our nation needs to defeat the coronavirus and the CDC, an operating division of HHS, will certainly participate in this streamlined all-of-government response. They will simply no longer control it.”
“The CDC’s old hospital data gathering operation once worked well monitoring hospital information across the country, but it’s an inadequate system today,” Caputo said in the statement.
The Times said hospitals are to begin reporting the data to HHS on Wednesday, noting also that the “database that will receive new information is not open to the public, which could affect the work of scores of researchers, modelers and health officials who rely on C.D.C. data to make projections and crucial decisions.”
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