The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “will no longer control” the coronavirus data collection system of hospitals across the country, a spokesman for the US Health and Human Services confirmed Tuesday. night.
The New York Times reported earlier Tuesday that the administration had ordered hospitals to bypass the CDC and submit all of the COVID-19 patient information to a central database in Washington beginning Wednesday, raising concerns for health experts that it will be politicized or withheld from the public.
Michael Caputo, deputy secretary of public affairs for the US Department of Health and Human Services, said in a statement to NBC News that it would be a faster system.
He said the CDC has a delay of about a week in reporting the hospital data.
“The new, faster and more comprehensive data system is what our nation needs to defeat the coronavirus, and the CDC, an operational division of HHS, will certainly participate in this simplified, government-wide response,” said Caputo. “They just won’t control it anymore,” he said.
The Times reported that the HHS database that will receive new information is not open to the public, which could affect researchers, modelers, and health officials who rely on CDC data to make projections and decisions.
Caputo told The Times that the CDC would still release the data.
In a statement to NBC News, he said that CDC data collection once worked well, but was inadequate today.
“The President’s Coronavirus Task Force has been asking for improvements for months, but they simply cannot keep up with this pandemic,” Caputo said. “Today, the CDC still provides data from only 85 percent of hospitals; the president’s COVID response requires 100 percent to report.”
Critics have charged that President Donald Trump has tried to downplay the severity of the coronavirus pandemic and that he or members of his administration have encouraged states to reopen even though the virus remains a threat.
Four former CDC directors or acting directors wrote an op-ed that appeared in The Washington Post on Tuesday titled: “We run the CDC. No president has ever politicized his science the way Trump has.”
Tom Frieden, Jeffrey Koplan, David Satcher and Richard Besser warned in the op-ed of “political leaders and others trying to undermine the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”
They wrote that the Trump administration has questioned the public about the CDC’s recommendations and highlighted comments about the reopening of schools.
As of Tuesday, more than 3.4 million cases of coronavirus COVID-19 disease have been confirmed in the United States, with more than 137,000 deaths related to the disease, according to the NBC News count.
The issue of opening public schools in the fall with increasing cases in many states has been a source of controversy.
In recent days, Trump and his administration have lobbied for schools to reopen completely, and the president says Democrats want schools to remain closed to harm their chances of reelection.
In California, the state’s two largest school districts, Los Angeles and San Diego, announced Monday that classes will be online only at the beginning of the school year, citing “high rates of infection” of the coronavirus in their areas.
