The Trump administration has restored public access to coronavirus data reported by hospitals to the federal government, after an outcry over missing data and controversy over a change in the agency that collects it.
The information is now being published on the Department of Health and Human Services's (HHS) site, HHS Protect, instead of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) National Healthcare Safety Network.
The change was necessary, officials said, because they believed the CDC's system was too slow, and wasn't able to keep up with the constantly changing information about the virus....
The new system will collect more data from more hospitals. CDC’s reporting system only collected data from about 3,000 of the country’s roughly 6,200 hospitals, HHS officials said. The new system collects data from about 4,500 hospitals in only a few days. It took weeks under the CDC system, officials said.
HHS last week instructed hospitals to change how they report certain coronavirus data to the government, bypassing the CDC and instead sending it to HHS directly. The new HHS database is run by a private contractor called TeleTracking, which was awarded a $10 million contract in April.
The move sparked an outcry from outside health groups that feared the CDC was being sidelined, and raised concerns about political interference.
For earlier story see https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/16/us-coronavirus-data-has-already-disappeared-after-trump-administration-shifted-control-from-cdc-to-hhs.html
