Rather than continue to send critical COVID-19 data to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Trump administration is now ordering hospitals to share that information directly with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
As first reported in The New York Times, the new reporting instructions were updated recently in an HHS document, mandating that starting July 15, hospitals send key COVID-19-related data, such as patient admissions, the availability of hospital beds and ventilators, testing results, and other important information that improves transparency around the pandemic, directly to HHS, bypassing the CDC. The daily reports are due to the HHS by 5 p.m. EST.
The HHS document specifically stated on page 10 of the 13-page file, “As of July 15,, 2020, hospitals should no longer report the Covid-19 information in this document to the National Healthcare Safety Network site.”
The CDC’s National Healthcare Safety Network is the nation’s most widely used healthcare-associated infection tracking system. NHSN provides facilities, states, regions, and the nation with data needed to identify problem areas, measure progress of prevention efforts, and ultimately eliminate healthcare-associated infections, according to CDC officials.
According to the NYT report, Michael R. Caputo, an HHS spokesperson, called CDC’s system inadequate and said the two systems would be linked. The CDC would continue to make data public, he said. “Today, the CDC still has at least a week lag in reporting hospital data,” said Caputo, per that report. “America requires it in real time. 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.”
Caputo further told NBC News that “Today, the CDC still provides data from only 85 percent of hospitals; the President’s COVID response requires 100 percent to report."
The tension between President Trump and the CDC has appeared to be mounting following a July 12 tweet from game show host Chuck Woolery who posted on Twitter that evening, “The most outrageous lies are the ones about Covid 19. Everyone is lying. The CDC, Media Democrats, our Doctors, not all but most, that we are told to trust.” Trump retweeted Woolery’s post.
Responding to the news, the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA), a community of over 12,000 physicians, scientists and public health experts who specialize in infectious diseases, expressed concern with the change in reporting protocols, stating that “Reports that the administration has established a procedure that would remove the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as a recipient of data on patients hospitalized with COVID-19 are troubling and, if implemented, will undermine our nation’s public health experts.”
The IDSA statement, attributed to the organization’s President, Thomas M. File, Jr., M.D., noted that “COVID-19 data collection and reporting must be done in a transparent and trustworthy manner and must not be politicized, as these data are the foundation that guide our response to the pandemic. Collecting and reporting public health data is a core function of the CDC, for which the agency has the necessary trained experts and infrastructure.”
The statement added, “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.”
IDSA concluded that the “administration should provide funding to support data collection and should strengthen the role of CDC to collect and report COVID-19 data by race and ethnicity, hospital and ICU capacity, total number of tests and percent positive, hospitalizations and deaths.”
