Patient information will now be sent to a new central database in Washington, DC run by the US Department of Health and Human Services instead of to the CDC, which has been criticised for slow and inconsistent public reporting of the number of cases, available beds and ventilators.
The sudden change, however, raises concerns among public health experts because President Donald Trump and White House officials have sidelined the science-based recommendations of the CDC in urging a quicker reopening of the US economy. On Tuesday, Trump again claimed the reason coronavirus cases are rising in the US is because testing has become widely available and he asserted death rates are continuing to decline, even though the data shows that infection rates are climbing.
Nationwide, the US has 3.4 million confirmed cases with 55,500 people hospitalised on Wednesday with the infection, a number that is now rising rapidly after dropping in May and June, according to The COVID Tracking Project, an independent data collection effort that draws its numbers from state health departments and other sources.
“I worry greatly about cutting CDC out of these reporting efforts,” Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for Health Security in Baltimore, told the Washington Post newspaper. “I see little benefit from separating reporting of hospitalisations from reporting of cases, which CDC currently coordinates.”
The Trump White House has also begun criticising the nation’s top infectious disease scientist Dr Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who has been a leading voice for public closures and social distancing to control the virus.
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