Trump Orders Hospitals To Not Send COVID-19 Data To CDC

The Trump administration has ordered hospitals not to send COVID-19 data to the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC) from an immediate effect.

Instead, Trump has issued an order to upload the data directly to a central database in Washington starting Wednesday, July 15. The information related to the decision has been updated in the Health and Human Services (HHS) document.

The order has been implemented with immediate effect. Following the announcement, one of the pages on the CDC website that tracked the number of hospital beds across the country occupied by COVID-19 patients stopped to work.

Later, the CDC confirmed that it was because of the new order and the switch. The CDC used to update the information from the National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN), which is run by it and is widely used to track hospital infections throughout the U.S.

During a press briefing, the CDC director Dr. Robert Redfield said that the agency has decided to pull NHSN out of the data collection process for COVID-19 patients in an attempt to “streamline reporting.”

However, eliminating such a useful piece of information from the website is an issue for the healthcare workers who use the metrics to identify how close is the hospital to reaching its full bed capacity and whether it would be able to accept more COVID-19 patients or not.

“The President’s Coronavirus Task Force has urged improvements for months, but they cannot keep up with this pandemic,” said the HHS assistant secretary for public affairs, Michael Caputo. “Today, the CDC still provides data from only 85 percent of hospitals; the President’s COVID response requires 100 percent to report.”

Caputo further added that even though the CDC will be a vital part of the process, it will no longer be controlling it.

Redfield has emphasized that switching to the new system will help streamline the process and reduce the burden of data reporting from the medical providers. He also said that this will ensure the best approach to distribute the “scarce resource.”