Don't expect the federal coronavirus response to get better

The Trump administration abruptly required hospitals to stop reporting COVID data to CDC and use a new reporting system set up by a contractor. Two weeks in, the promised improvements in the data have yet to materialize.

  NPR

You're as shocked as I am, no doubt.

Michael Caputo, HHS assistant secretary for public affairs, framed the switch at the time in a statement to NPR as a technology upgrade from "the CDC's old data gathering operation," which "just cannot keep up with this pandemic."

"The new faster and complete data system is what our nation needs to defeat the coronavirus," Caputo wrote.

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Instead, the public data hub created under the new system is updated erratically and is rife with inconsistencies and errors, data analysts say.

A feature, not a bug.

The data now available to the public appears to be neither faster nor more complete.

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The established system was disrupted by a memo dated July 10, issued to hospitals by HHS. In the memo, HHS took the unusual step of instructing hospitals to stop reporting the capacity data to CDC, and to instead use a reporting platform developed recently by the private contractor, TeleTracking. As NPR has reported, the details of how the contract was awarded to TeleTracking are unclear.

Surprise, surprise.

Lawmakers plan to grill members of the White House Coronavirus Task Force about the reporting change, and what's being done to ensure the data remains public and reliable, in a Friday morning hearing of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus. Several House subcommittees have already launched an investigation into to the data change.

The delays and problems with data on the availability of beds, ventilators and safety equipment could have profound consequences as infections and deaths soar throughout most of the country, public health experts say.

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For instance, knowing which hospitals have the capacity to take on new patients is critical.

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When HHS took over the collection and reporting of this hospital capacity data, it promised to update "multiple times each day." Later, the agency walked that back to say it would be updated daily.

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On Thursday, an HHS spokesperson told NPR via e-mail, "We will be updating the site to make it clear that the estimates are only updated weekly."

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CDC posted estimates derived from the data to show an approximation of the actual availability of ICU beds, accounting for the lags and gaps in reporting. These estimates — promised on the HHS website — have not been updated in over a week.

By contrast, the CDC estimates was updated three times a week. And while the data sent to CDC was vetted for accuracy before being posted publicly, the data sent to the new platform appears to be posted as it is received and contains multiple anomalies, analysts note.

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Still, hospitals are required to report this data daily to TeleTracking, either directly or via their state health department. Failure to do so could affect the state's access to remdesivir, one of the few drugs that's shown promise in treating severe COVID-19 cases, according to the HHS guidance to hospitals and the American Hospital Association.

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Hospitals got only a few days notice of the change and scrambled to adapt.

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The only information about hospital capacity that appears to be updated regularly on the HHS Protect site is the percentage of hospitals that have submitted data in the past seven days.

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Public health groups objected to the change as unnecessary and burdensome for hospitals in the midst of a pandemic. Open government organizations demanded that HHS rescind its guidance and return control of the data to CDC. On Tuesday, 22 state attorneys general added to the chorus of those demanding that HHS reverse course.

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[A] higher level of compliance is not the whole picture, according to a CDC official familiar with the former reporting system. The tallies do not include certain categories of hospitals, including rehabilitation or veterans' hospitals, which have suffered COVID-19 outbreaks. These rehabilitation and veterans' hospitals had previously been included in the data reported by CDC.

You see where they're going with this.

The organizers of the tracking website COVID Exit Strategy initially found the data provided by HHS Protect to be unusable. "It had some states like Rhode Island having an inpatient bed utilization of above 100%," says site co-founder Ryan Panchadsaram, "And Rhode Island is a state where hospitalizations are quite low for COVID."

Another feature: completely useless data.

The site stopped pulling hospital capacity data from HHS Protect for several days but resumed the reporting on July 30, using a dataset from HealthData.gov with a "user beware" warning that reads in part: "For the time being, we recommend cross-checking these numbers with the ones reported on a state's official website to get an accurate picture."

The article includes specific data anomalies in various states. Continue reading by clicking here.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.