July 23, 2020 – Hospitals and states are scrambling to adopt a new national COVID-19 data reporting system hastily implemented by the Trump administration last week that has left some, mostly rural, states in the dark about the severity of their own coronavirus outbreaks.
The White House last week abruptly instructed all hospitals to stop reporting their COVID-19 data to the CDC’s National Healthcare Safety Network. Instead, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) instructed hospitals to report the data to HHS through a new portal that went live this week. HHS gave hospitals only two days to comply and is withholding remdesivir, a vital drug used to treat COVID-19, from hospitals that do not comply.
Some states do not collect the data themselves and rely on the CDC to assemble and share the information, which public officials use to decide how to allocate key resources.