As the world experiences new, more transmissible Covid-19 variants, scientists and health officials in the U.S. are still struggling to gather accurate and timely domestic data to help inform policy decisions to safeguard Americans, Politico reports.
Continuing gaps in the CDC’s data collection program, which almost two years into the pandemic still relies on state health departments who use a mix of often incompatible and outdated state systems to identify cases, impedes the nation’s understanding of where and how fast the virus is spreading, according to more than a dozen state and federal officials involved in tracking cases.
The fact that the data gaps have been apparent since the start of the pandemic makes the lack of substantial improvement particularly galling to many infectious disease specialists.
“I think we’ve done a horrible job from day one in data tracking for the pandemic,” said Eric Topol, a professor of molecular medicine at Scripps Research and former advisory board member of the Covid Tracking Project, a team that worked to collect and synthesize local Covid-19 during the peak of the pandemic. “We’re not tracking all the things that we need to to get a handle on what’s going on. It is embarrassing.”
The administration’s dependence on international data underscores the extent to which the U.S. public health data infrastructure is still failing to produce real-time data on not only the spread of the virus but also the degree to which the virus evades the vaccine and the degree to which it impacts various American populations. It also raises questions about whether the American public health system, supported by state health departments, will be able to sustain itself under the inevitable deluge of Omicron cases that will pop up across the U.S. in the coming months. Read more at Politico.
{Matzav.com}
Rachel Walensky is an embarrassment. She is a complete puppet of Joe Biden.
yaasher koach, you read all about it in the internet
The CDC struggle to track covid because hospitals are empty.
The CDC wants to leave the situation the way it is because if there’s accurate data, their lies will be much more difficult to hide. Harvard university once worked with them to automate their vaers (vaccine adverse event reporting system), and when they realised that the system was only picking up 1% or less of bad reactions to vaccines, and the automated system would majorly increase that figure, they broke off all contact with the university.