USA deeply caught in the "data crisis" of covid for three reasons

Reporter : Wen Lele / Publisher : China Science News

Ref : http://news.sciencenet.cn/htmlnews/2020/9/444950.shtm

Translation, editing : Gan Yung Chyan, KUCINTA SETIA

Image : In April, at a medical center in New York City, USA, medical staff checked the data on the computer before treating patients with covid. Image credit: Robert Nickelsberg / Getty Images

For the past 7 months, the Korea Center for Disease Control and Prevention has updated its website almost every day, providing real-time information about the local epidemic and statistics on the covid epidemic in each region of the country. In contrast, the United States provided few details on how the disease spread.

According to "Nature" reports, experts believe that political interference, concerns about privacy, and years of neglect of public health monitoring systems are the reasons for the lack of data on the covid epidemic in the United States.

Some people speculate that due to political considerations, the data describing the epidemic has been scrutinized by the US government. The researchers said that the survey published in the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) magazine Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report has been comprehensive, but it is often released after a long time.

 In July, the U.S. government announced that data on covid infections and hospitalizations will be transferred from the CDC and processed by a new system launched by the Department of Health and Human Services. The person in charge of the system reports directly to the President. So far, the data of the new system has been lagging by one week, and only the number of cases and hospital capacity information are released, not including details such as gatherings and places where the patients were infected with SARS-CoV-2.

Georges Benjamin, Executive Director of the American Public Health Association, said this change has made data collection more chaotic. Some hospital administrators do not know which agencies to report to. What makes him even more frustrated is that the $10 million spent on the new system could have been better used to improve the public health data management of the CDC and its cooperating health departments across the United States.

Experts say that this neglect of public health data has become more serious during the  pandemic. There are no uniform regulations on the information that hospitals and testing laboratories must report to the health department.

Ranu Dhillon, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School, said that neither the local health department nor the CDC asked him to report where patients may have been exposed to SARS-CoV-2.

Public health expert Amy Lockwood said that many departments hope to obtain such data, but it is difficult to obtain it from the hospital or laboratory that provides the test.

She said that some test providers do not collect occupational and other information because they worry that asking such questions will make people afraid to take the test. At the same time, some hospitals will record this information, but will not pass it to the analysis laboratory where the sample is tested. Therefore, when the laboratory shares a case with the health department, the relevant report will lack these details.