Adrianna Rodriguez, USA TODAY
Published 9:27 a.m. ET July 15, 2020 | Updated 11:39 a.m. ET July 15, 2020
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The Trump administration has ordered hospitals to bypass the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and send all COVID-19 patient information to a central database in Washington starting Wednesday, according to a Health and Human Services document updated July 10.
Michael Caputo, HHS assistant secretary for public affairs, said in a statement the new coronavirus data collection system would be “faster,” adding that the CDC has a one-week lag in reporting hospital data.
“The President’s Coronavirus Task Force has urged improvements for months, but they cannot keep up with this pandemic,” he said. “Today, the CDC still provides data from only 85 percent of hospitals; the President’s COVID response requires 100 percent to report.”
Caputo added: “The CDC, an operating division of HHS, will certainly participate in this streamlined all-of-government response. They will simply no longer control it.”
Public health experts and infectious disease scientists are sounding an alarm on the new protocols, noting that further politicization of this pandemic will hurt frontline workers and patients.
“Placing medical data collection outside of the leadership of public health experts could severely weaken the quality and availability of data, add an additional burden to already overwhelmed hospitals and add a new challenge to the U.S. pandemic response,” Dr. Thomas File, president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, said in a statement.
He also said collecting and reporting public health data is a “core function of the CDC” and bypassing the agency would “undermine our nation’s public health experts.”
“As infectious diseases physicians, front-line providers and scientists, we urge the administration to follow public health expertise in addressing this public health crisis,” File said.
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The news follows a Tuesday Washington Post op-ed written by four former CDC directors or acting directors criticizing President Donald Trump for “politicizing science.”
“These repeated efforts to subvert sound public health guidelines introduce chaos and uncertainty while unnecessarily putting lives at risk,” they wrote.
During a video meeting Wednesday with the USA TODAY editorial board, one of the authors, former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. David Satcher, called the sidelining of the agency “very scary.”
“There is conflict right now between the CDC and the White House,” Satcher said. “Somehow we’ve got to get past the conflict in the interest of saving lives.”
As of Wednesday, the U.S. has surpassed 3.4 million cases with over 136,000 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University. Globally, there have been 13.3 million cases and over 578,000 deaths.
Follow Adrianna Rodriguez on Twitter: @AdriannaUSAT.
Health and patient safety coverage at USA TODAY is made possible in part by a grant from the Masimo Foundation for Ethics, Innovation and Competition in Healthcare. The Masimo Foundation does not provide editorial input.
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