White House: Hospitals should submit COVID-19 data to Washington, no longer to CDC [Video]

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW:

• A spokesman from the US Health and Human Services (HHS) revealed on Tuesday that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will no longer manage the collection of COVID-19 data from hospitals across the country.
• HHS assistant secretary Michael Caputo said that starting on Wednesday, hospitals are mandated to send all coronavirus-related information in a central database in Washington.
• Expressing their concerns, health experts warned that the data could be politicized or concealed from the public.

A US Health and Human Services spokesperson revealed on Tuesday night that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will “no longer control” the data banking of coronavirus cases gathered from hospitals throughout the country.

Starting on Wednesday, the White House mandates hospitals to turn over all COVID-19 patient information to Washington centralized database, the New York Times reported on Tuesday. 

In a statement to NBC News, US Department of Health and Human Services (HSS) assistant secretary for public affairs Michael Caputo said that the reporting of data would be more efficient as the CDC recently encounters roughly a one-week lag.

“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,” Caputo said. 

“They will simply no longer control it,” he added.

In his statement to NBC News, Caputo claimed that CDC’s data collection was now lacking.

“The President’s Coronavirus Task Force has urged improvements for months, but they just cannot keep up with this pandemic,” the assistant secretary said. “Today, the CDC still provides data from only 85 percent of hospitals; the President’s COVID response requires 100 percent to report.”

Based on The Times report, the HHS database which will receive the information would not be available to the public. This could impact the researchers, modelers, and health experts in making projections and decisions.

Although Caputo told The Times that the CDC would still release the data in public.

However, health experts warned that the data could be susceptible to political maneuvering or be concealed from the public.

The Washington Post published an op-ed on Tuesday titled: “We ran the CDC. No president ever politicized its science the way Trump has.” It was authored by four former CDC directors ╼ Tom Frieden, Jeffrey Koplan, David Satcher, and Richard Besser.

They warned of “political leaders and others attempting to undermine the CDC.” The four former directors also said that Trump administration has bestowed the agency’s credibility by making light of its recommendations.

President Donald Trump has earned the ire of critics who have accused him of downplaying the COVID-19 health crisis as he pushed the country’s reopening amid the ongoing pandemic.

According to NBC News monitoring, there are over 3.4 million reported coronavirus cases in the US as of Tuesday, with a death toll of more than 137,000 due to COVID-19.

Source: AOL