Daily Times

Hospital data on coronavirus sufferer will now be rerouted to the Trump administration instead of first being sent to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Health and Human Services confirmed.

The change raised questions about the reliability of the process. Some former health officials agonize the move could result in less transparent data, although they accredited in interviews that the CDC’s data collection system is obsolete and doesn’t meet the demands of the Covid-19 pandemic.

“The CDC’s old data gathering operation once worked well monitoring hospital information across the country, but it’s an inadequate system today,” HHS spokesman Michael Caputo said in a statement. “The President’s Coronavirus Task Force has urged improvements for months, but they just cannot keep up with this pandemic.”

CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield said in a conference call with reporters that states were told to stop sending hospital information to the National Healthcare Safety Network site. He added that the decision was made in conjunction the CDC.

“In order to meet the needs for flexibility of data gathering, CDC has agreed to remove the National Health Safety Network from the collection process in order to rationalize reporting,” he said. “This has no effect on CDCs ability to use data and continue to execute daily data.

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 plagued 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.

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