White House orders hospitals to bypass CDC on COVID-19 data

At the direction of the Trump administration, hospitals have been told that starting Wednesday, they must stop sending coronavirus patient information to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, instead having it go directly to a Health and Human Services database that is not open to the public, The New York Times reports.

The reports are sent daily, and include information on how many COVID-19 patients are being treated at each hospital and the number of available beds and ventilators. Dr. Janis Orlowski, the chief health care officer of the Association of American Medical Colleges, told the Times the change was made after Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, decided hospitals were not doing a good enough job fully reporting their data. This new plan was conceived by a working group of hospital and government officials.

Administration officials say this will make it easier to know what supplies are needed in different areas, but health experts are worried this could lead to data becoming politicized or hidden from the researchers, modelers, and other people who rely on it. Jen Kates, director of global health and HIV policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told the Times she has several questions, including, "How will the data be protected? Will there be transparency, will there be access, and what is the role of the CDC in understanding the data?"

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Health and Human Services spokesman Michael Caputo told the Times this "new, faster, and complete data system is what our nation needs to defeat the coronavirus," and while the CDC will "no longer control" the data, the institute will continue to make it public. Read more at The New York Times.