Centers for Disease Control and Prevention could lose access to key metrics for monitoring COVID-19, the agency warned on Monday, a victim of the end approaching a wide range of disease powers. emergency that the federal government has exerted to respond to the pandemic of years.
“Data related to COVID-19 test results and hospitalizations are currently available due to the public health emergency declaration. When this declaration expires, so does CDC’s access to this important information.” , Kathleen Conley of the CDC said in a statement to CBS News.
“We are the compiler of the data, but we do not have the authority to collect it. That is why we trust that the states are willing to share it with us and the data use authorization, data use agreements , to do it”. CDC News director Dr. Rochelle Walensky told CBS News chief medical officer Dr. Jon LaPook in an interview for “60 Minutes.”
The CDC’s current guidance for COVID-19 is largely based on data on cases and hospitalizations across the country, which it analyzes to obtain “COVID-19 community levels” county by county. Federal hospital data has also allowed the Biden administration to monitor the health system’s tension, as well as warning signs about the danger posed by the virus.
“The nation can continue with the current and broken approach of collecting public health data to be better prepared for future pandemics,” Conley said.
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Under the public health emergency first declared by the Trump administration in 2020, the federal government can access a number of funds and authorities to curb outbreaks. The declaration, which must be renewed every 90 days, was last extended in mid-January.
This includes the power that Congress gave to the federal government under the CARES Act to compel laboratories to report the results of COVID-19 “tests until the end of the Secretary’s public health emergency declaration regarding COVID-19 or any extension of this statement “.
The CDC has promoted efforts to modernize its data systems by investing money and labor in updating its programs to collect and analyze disease data nationwide.
However, the response to the US pandemic has also been criticized for a sometimes delayed pace in monitoring and analyzing the spread of the virus compared to its counterparts abroad. For example, the Biden administration relied in part on Israeli data to make key decisions about boosting injections of the COVID-19 vaccine last year.
“They have a unique health system that speaks freely to their public health system. Their data speaks freely to each other, and so they can report incredible kinds of science that we can’t,” Walensky said.
The White House is considering a proposal that could extend CDC access to key hospital COVID data even after the end of the emergency, Reuters reported Monday, under regulations imposed on facilities. by the Medicare and Medicaid Service Centers.
Currently, the federal government collects data from more than 90% of hospitals in most states through a platform called “HHS Protect” that the Trump administration first proposed in April 2020.
A White House spokesman did not comment on the report, and postponed the comment to the CDC. A CDC spokesman said the agency could not comment.
Officials of the time described the movement to bypass the CDC’s own data collection system as part of the “streamlining” of data collection efforts, allowing the agency’s National Health Security Network to focus on collecting data from nursing homes. This network would once again be in charge of being the hospital data clearing center under the new proposal, Bloomberg reported.
“We cannot return to the world as it was before the pandemic, but there are concrete and measurable ways to move forward and begin to understand this disease as one more seasonal virus,” said Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, vice president of global initiatives. at the University of Pennsylvania, he said in a statement earlier this month.
Emanuel coordinated the 136-page report “A Roadmap for Living with COVID” earlier this month, which he co-authored with several health experts who had been the team’s top external COVID-19 advisors. of Biden.
Among the report’s recommendations, the authors urged policymakers to create “a secure, standardized, real-time national data platform for SARS-CoV-2 and other health threats” and to report state.
“The Covid pandemic has highlighted the data problems that researchers and public health officials have been complaining about for decades,” the report’s authors wrote.
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