The Trump administration is asking state governors to consider sending the National Guard to hospitals to help improve data collection about novel coronavirus patients, supplies and capacity The move is part of a new data reporting protocol for hospitals that eliminates the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) (Atlanta, GA) as a recipient of that information.
“In a letter to the nation’s governors that says the National Guard could help improve hospitals’ data flow, HHS Secretary Alex Azar and Deborah Birx, the White House’s Coronavirus Task Force response coordinator, say they ordered the changes because some hospitals have failed to report the information daily or completely,” the Washington Post reports.
That portrayal, and the involvement of the National Guard, have infuriated hospital industry leaders, who say any data collection problems lie primarily with HHS and repeatedly shifting federal instructions.
The new protocol, to begin Wednesday, leaves healthcare institutions to report information daily about COVID-19 to a federal contractor or to their state, which would then coordinate the federal reporting.
Public health experts say bypassing the CDC could harm the quality of data and the federal response to the coronavirus pandemic. Under the reporting system that is ending, about 3,000 hospitals — or the health systems that own them — send detailed information about covid-19 patients and other metrics to the CDC’s long-standing hospital network, the National Healthcare Safety Network, or NHSN.
The move could further marginalize the CDC, the government’s premier public health agency, at a time when the pandemic is worsening in most of the country…