Thread by @DrEricDing

So last week, CDC got kneecapped from getting the #COVID19 hospitalization data. Trump HHS forced all hospitals across country to shift to a new private system not controlled by CDC....

...and it is going as well as you can imagine. As in, TERRIBLE. 🧵 politico.com/news/2020/07/2…

2) first, “The reporting is largely manual. … Each hospital is tasking this to one or more employees,” said Brian Dixon, a public health informatics expert working with Indiana on its coronavirus response. “You can imagine the process is confusing and a burden.”

3) “Some Colorado hospitals are entering the same information multiple times in more than one system over the course of a day, because the system hospitals used to send information to the state hasn't caught up with HHS' additional data requirements”

4) “Erroneous reports — or failing to enter the data daily — could limit the supply of remdesivir, among the most promising treatment tested so far. Shipments of convalescent plasma to fight the virus and gowns and other protective gear could also be reduced.”

5) “Experts in medical technology are concerned about the technology being used by the government. In a Monday call, HHS officials stated they were not using a state-of-the-art tech standard known as HL7, and instead relied on other, unnamed standards.”

6) “Critics of the reporting change are also fixated on new holes in the data. On Sunday, the independent COVID Tracking Project fixed on purportedly suspicious statistics in hospitalization data in Alabama.”

7) “Dashboards in at least one state have also gone offline. In Missouri, the hospital association was aggregating data for the state’s public dashboard. But a notice on the website informs users that the data hasn’t been updated since last week”

8) Summary - it seems there is a lot of chaos and additional burden to get the data we need. Hopefully it’ll be better down the road but meantime, this switchover during middle of pandemic is causing a lot of strife.