Trump Administration To Hospitals: Don’t Send Covid-19 Coronavirus Data To CDC

[horn]

DISGUSTING ACT!

In interviews with CNN, CDC officials say their agency's efforts to mount a coordinated response to the Covid-19 pandemic have been hamstrung by a White House whose decisions are driven by politics rather than science.

[horn]

 

[horn]

Trump administration cuts CDC out of data collection on hospitalized COVID-19 patients. 
The move has immediate effect.
Adrianna Rodriguez | Elizabeth Weise | USA TODAY | 16 July 2020

The Trump administration ordered hospitals to bypass the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and send all COVID-19 patient information to a central database in Washington, starting Wednesday, according to a Health and Human Services document updated July 10.

The handoff had an immediate effect. Wednesday afternoon one of the important CDC pages that tracked changes over time in how many hospital beds in the nation are occupied by COVID-19 patients ceased working. The CDC confirmed the page's disappearance was a consequence of the switch.

It was first noted by Charles Ornstein from the news non-profit ProPublica.

The data came from the National Healthcare Safety Network, the most widely used hospital infection tracking system in the United States. It is run by the CDC.

In a call with reporters Wednesday, CDC director Dr. Robert Redfield said the agency has agreed to remove the NHSN from the collection process in order to streamline reporting.

The disappearance of the site takes away a useful metric of the pandemic for health care workers.

Changes in time of the number of hospital beds being occupied by COVID-19 patients tells public health officials how close to being unable to accept new patients a hospital or a region is, or if things are getting better.

Michael Caputo, HHS assistant secretary for public affairs, said in a statement earlier Wednesday the new coronavirus data collection system would be “faster,” and 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,” he said. “Today, the CDC still provides data from only 85 percent of hospitals; the President’s COVID response requires 100 percent 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, 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.

"We at CDC know that the life blood of public health is data," he said. "Collecting, disseminating data as rapidly as possible is our priority and the reason for the policy change we’re discussing today."

The CDC, along with many federal agencies, has long struggled to provide state-of-the-art data systems with lagging funding and sought to upgrade its systems. 

Redfield indicated the change would not be detrimental, saying the new system would streamline the process, reduce duplication and the reporting burden on medical providers and "enable us to distribute the scarce resources, using the best possible approach," he said. 

"We’ve merely streamlined data collection for hospitals on the front lines," he stressed. "No one is taking access or data away from CDC."

Public health experts and infectious disease scientists sounded an alarm on the protocols, noting that further politicization of the pandemic will hurt health 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 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.

A Tuesday Washington Post op-ed written by four former or acting CDC directors criticized President Donald Trump for “politicizing science.”

“These repeated efforts to subvert sound public health guidelines introduce chaos and uncertainty 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 David Satcher, called the sidelining of the agency “very scary.”

“There is conflict right now between the CDC and the White House,” Satcher said. “Somehow we’ve got to get past the conflict in the interest of saving lives.”

As of Wednesday, the USA surpassed 3.4 million cases and 136,000 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University. Globally, there have been 13.3 million cases and more than 579,000 deaths.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2020/07/15/trump-administration-orders-hospitals-not-send-covid-19-data-cdc/5441730002/

[Camacho]

This country as a whole will never get it under control while he’s still in office!

[horn]

It's funny both Florida & Texas has a 25% & 32% sharp drop respectively and I wonder why?  

[Cyber-Raga]

Rather transparent, wouldn’t you say? 
 

He is such a vile cunt. 

[Creepy Insane Person]

I feel soo sorry for americans. The virus is out of control and continually spiraling up become the worlds epi centre yet trump isnt doing anything while it gets worse by the day. 

[horn]

U.S. COVID-19 deaths drop for first time in four weeks
August 11 2020

The country posted more than 376,000 new COVID-19 cases for the week ended August 9, or an average of roughly 53,000 per day. New cases have now fallen for three straight weeks, though the United States still accounts for a quarter of the global total of 20 million cases.

Last week’s decline in new cases came largely from recent hot spots. For instance, new cases in Arizona fell by more than 48% in the last week, and on Aug. 9 the state reported fewer than 1,000 cases for the first time since June 29.

The rate of community spread in Florida, California and Tennessee remained high, but they all reported fewer cases than in the previous week, according to the Reuters tally.

Hawaii had kept the virus at bay for most of the summer, but new cases more than doubled last week to over 1,200. On August 6, Hawaii Governor David Ige said he would reinstate inter-island travel restrictions that require people to quarantine for 14 days.

In South Dakota, new cases increased for the third straight week. More than 100,000 motorcycle enthusiasts are expected to travel from all over the country to attend an annual rally in Sturgis, South Dakota, which began on Aug. 7.

Nationally, the share of all tests that came back positive for the novel coronavirus held steady at 8%, according to data from The COVID Tracking Project, a volunteer-run effort to track the outbreak. Mississippi and Texas had the highest positive rates in the country at 21%.

Only 15 states reported a positive rate under 5%, which is the threshold that the World Health Organization considers concerning because it suggests there are more cases in the community that have not yet been uncovered.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-trends/us-covid-19-deaths-drop-for-first-time-in-four-weeks-idUSKCN2562I7

I hope it's a genuine drop.