malchior wrote: Thu Jul 16, 2020 10:31 am
Smoove_B wrote: Thu Jul 16, 2020 9:59 am
Yup. Read about it
here:
On the CDC site where data on available hospital beds and ICU was previously stored, a note now reads, “Data displayed on this page was submitted directly to CDC’s National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN) and does not include data submitted to other entities contracted by or within the federal government.”
“We don’t have this critical indicator anymore,” Panchadsaram said. “The intent of just switching the data streams towards HHS, that’s fine. But you got to keep the data that you’re sharing publicly still available and up to date.”
Panchadsaram said he and his team, which includes researchers from the Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy and from Resolve to Save Lives, a public health initiative led by former CDC director Dr. Tom Frieden, have been tracking the data since April.
The whole thing astounds me. This flies in the face of the bare basic minimum standard of care - so to speak - that you need to achieve when you are cutting over a critical information resource *in the middle of a damn crisis*. The new platform needs to exist and you need to transition it to such a way that you don't interrupt the damn service. We don't know if the platform exists, works...we don't know anything.
Surprise! This seat of the pants switchover went badly. The last sentence is what intrigues me. I smell graft. Fuckers.
WSJ wrote:Public release of hospital data about the coronavirus pandemic has slowed to a crawl, one month after the federal government ordered states to report it directly to the Department of Health and Human Services and bypass the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Key indicators, such as estimates of the portion of inpatient beds occupied by Covid-19 patients, are lagging by a week or more, making it harder for citizens and local officials to get a handle on how the pandemic is progressing and for agencies to allocate supplies of antiviral drugs and personal protective equipment, public-health experts say.
The decision to switch data reporting in the middle of a public-health crisis was reckless, researchers and former public-health officials say.
“The transition has been a disaster,” as hospitals typically take time to adjust to new data systems, said Jeffrey Engel, senior adviser to the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists, an association that represents state public-health officials. “What HHS said was that the CDC was not nimble enough and couldn’t handle new data elements, and that’s simply not true.”
HHS officials say the new system is more complete because more hospitals are reporting a more thorough set of statistics. But because the system is so new, it is taking time to ensure the quality of the data and control for variations in numbers such as the quantity of cases reported each day. The quality-control process has led to some delays in reporting hospital capacity estimates, HHS says.
Under the CDC, between 2,900 and 3,000 hospitals were reporting coronavirus-related data each day, while now, nearly twice as many hospitals are reporting, a senior HHS official said. But HHS needs more time to analyze the data to establish confidence in the results, this person said.
“We’ve been at it for a month now, so we’re starting to see the data stabilize and shake out. It’s why the data has only been updated on a weekly basis,” the official said. “In being more transparent, it creates some level of confusion [in the short term].”
...
“There’s been inconsistent reporting, there have been serious lags in the reporting. The last time I reviewed it, some data was 11 days old, and now it’s three days old,” Dr. Frieden said. “They pulled it away from CDC because it was updated three times a week, and now they update it once a week. Give me a break.”
HHS’s estimated patient impact and hospital-capacity statistics, for example, weren’t updated between Aug. 3 and Aug. 10, according to a review of HHS data by The Wall Street Journal. That data set includes indicators such as inpatient and intensive-care beds occupied by Covid-19 patients, which researchers say are key to understanding the pandemic.
“We’re not doing a good job of tracking either the virus or our response to it, and because of that we’re flying blind,” Dr. Frieden said. “That’s the big picture.”
Twenty-two state attorneys general, led by Maura Healy of Massachusetts, sent a letter in late July to HHS Secretary Alex Azar, demanding that the agency reverse the decision and return to the old data collection system.
“This sudden disruption...harms the nation’s ability to track and respond to the pandemic, hampers state and local public health authorities’ efforts to address the crisis in their communities, risks compromising the health data of millions of Americans, and undermines public confidence in any reports about COVID-19 coming from the federal government,” the letter said.
In early July, the White House coronavirus task force asked the CDC to add dozens of new elements to its National Health Safety Network system, which has been in place for about 15 years. The White House gave the CDC a deadline of two to three days, the HHS official said, but the CDC said it needed two to three weeks to implement changes.
HHS, on orders from the White House task force, on July 10 instructed hospitals to switch from the CDC’s system to a new one operated by a private contractor called TeleTracking Technologies Inc., the HHS official said.
