The United States does not report vital information about Covid-19 that could help track the spread of the disease and prevent the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans, according to the nation’s first comprehensive review of the coronavirus data.
The report, Tracking Covid-19 in the United States, paints a bleak picture of the country’s response to the disease. Five months after the pandemic, the essential intelligence that would allow public health authorities to deal with the virus is not yet being compiled in a usable form.
That includes critical data on evidence, contact tracing, new cases, and deaths.
What the authors call “life and death information” is being randomly gathered by individual states in a way that is “inconsistent, incomplete, and inaccessible in most places.” Without such intelligence, the country is effectively walking blind, with very little chance of taking “our children to school in the fall, going back to work, restarting our economy, and preventing tens of thousands of deaths.”
The review has been conducted by Resolve to Save Lives, a part of the Vital Strategies global health group. It is chaired by Tom Frieden, the former director of the United States’ leading public health agency, The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Frieden blames Donald Trump for the sad and deadly state of data maintenance. Introducing the report, he said the chaotic image was the product of “the failure of the national leadership.” The United States is flying blind in our effort to curb the spread of Covid-19. “
He added that “the lack of common standards, definitions and accountability reflects the absence of national strategy, plan, leadership, communication or organization and results in a cacophony of confusing data.”
Solve to save lives collaborated with leading US healthcare organizations, including the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Safety and the American Public Health Association, to produce a checklist of 15 essential data points in the fight against Covid-19. Among the categories that must be registered to contain the disease are real-time reports of people with symptoms similar to Covid’s, new confirmed cases, hospitalizations, deaths, and contact tracing.
What the authors discovered is shocking reading, even for a country that has repeatedly generated grim headlines since the pandemic began. In all states, only 40% of essential data points are being monitored and reported to the public.
More than half of the critical information is yet to be fully reported, depriving political leaders of the weapons they need to fight the virus. For 11 of the 15 essential data points, not a single state reported them correctly; and in nine other categories, more than half of the states report nothing about them.
Most alarming is contact tracing, a technique to isolate infected people that, according to most experts, is critical to any attempt to control the pandemic. The report found that the information shared on contact tracing was “abysmal” as not a single state reported the response time for diagnostic test results and only two states recorded how long it took contact trackers. interview people who tested positive to identify others. have infected
The lack of a federal strategy to fight Covid-19 has been evident in the United States from the beginning. The authors note that many countries such as Germany, Senegal, and South Korea have introduced national Covid-19 panels that standardize the data and make it easier for health experts to track and fight the virus.
Rather, Trump has encouraged the proliferation of chaos and confusion at the state level by prohibiting aggressive federal action. Since the first coronavirus case was reported in Washington state on January 20, the US President has used his considerable powers to undermine a scientific and data-driven fight against the disease.
He has frequently predicted that the virus will “go away” on its own, most recently in his Fox News Sunday interview with Chris Wallace this weekend.
Under his anti-scientific approach, Trump has tried to block new funding for CDC and for coronavirus testing, which he says are falsely responsible for the large increase in cases in many states. He has also chaired a smear campaign against Anthony Fauci, the leading infectious disease expert in the United States.
By constantly resisting an aggressive federal attack on the virus and unloading responsibility, and awaiting political responsibility, for the unfolding of calamity in the states, Trump has created the conditions for the current increase in infection in large areas of the country.
The impact in terms of lives lost or interrupted is clearly reflected in the latest egregious numbers showing the number of confirmed cases at 3.8 million across the country and increasing in 40 of the 50 states. More than 140,000 Americans have died so far, almost double the number recorded by the next most affected country, Brazil.
Ultimately, lack of nationally consistent intelligence is important for two reasons: it makes the job of isolating and controlling the disease more difficult, and it leaves the public with no idea of the severity of the threat around them. Two groups of citizens are especially exposed to the paucity of data: older people in nursing homes and African-Americans.
The report notes that a third of states still do not report data on Covid-19 outbreaks in facilities with contained populations, such as nursing homes, homeless shelters, and prisons and jails. That represents a great risk to life, as more than 40% of deaths in the US have occurred in long-term care facilities, including nursing homes.
States also do not report real-time data on the demographic breakdown of the disease, especially by race and ethnicity. Black Americans have endured the worst part of the pandemic, dying at almost three times the rate of white Americans.
