General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe administration orders hospitals to bypass the C.D.C. with key virus data, alarming health expert
The Trump administration has ordered hospitals to bypass the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and, beginning on Wednesday, send all coronavirus patient information to a central database in Washington a move that has alarmed public health experts who fear the data will be distorted for political gain.
The new instructions are contained in a little-noticed document posted this week on the Department of Health and Human Services website, Sheryl Gay Stolberg reports. From now on, H.H.S., and not the C.D.C., will collect daily reports about the patients that each hospital is treating, how many beds and ventilators are available, and other information vital to tracking the pandemic.
Officials say the change will streamline data gathering and assist the White House coronavirus task force in allocating scarce supplies like personal protective gear and the drug remdesivir. Some hospital officials welcome the move, saying it will relieve them of responding to requests from multiple federal agencies, though others said the C.D.C. should be collecting the data.
The C.D.C. is the right agency to be at the forefront of collecting the data, said Dr. Bala Hota, the chief analytics officer at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago.
Public health experts have long expressed concerns that the administration is politicizing science and undermining the disease control centers; four former C.D.C. directors, spanning both Republican and Democratic administrations, said as much in an opinion piece published Tuesday in The Washington Post. The data collection shift reinforced those fears.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/world/coronavirus-updates.html#link-47bd459f
napi21
(45,806 posts)Hopefully, the press will be able to get raw data & keep their own virus stats.
pwb
(11,308 posts)I figure trump killed every person over 50,000. I am amazed Why people want to know or care what Trump thinks about anything. The Hoax, Fox News lag is upon us. We would all be watching sports and heading back to school if the red of the country Didn't always have another view of very dam thing. Hospitals do not take orders.