It didn't even take a week after the new policy to reroute COVID-19 daily data through the Trump regime rather than the directly to the CDC for the regime to start removing COVID-19 data from the CDC website completely.
Following the Trump administration’s decision to reroute coronavirus hospital data first to the administration, instead of sending it to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, some data is no longer available on the CDC.gov website.
The information removed from the website is the hospital data that was reported to the CDC’s National Healthcare Safety Network, according to CDC spokesperson Kristen Nordlund.
The data includes...
The information appeared on the National Healthcare Safety Network Covid-19 module page and the CDC’s Covid-19 data tracker.
- the current inpatient and intensive care unit bed occupancy
- Health care worker staffing
- Personal protective equipment supply status and availability
Remember, the regime claimed that the CDC had to be removed from the reporting chain because the data wasn't getting to the people who needed it quickly enough.
The health department on Friday told hospitals to stop reporting Covid data through the CDC’s National Healthcare Safety Network and, as of 10 p.m. tonight, submit data only through two other systems, called HHS Protect or Teletracking. Until now, all three systems had been viable data-reporting options.
The change — which hospitals are working swiftly to try to accommodate — was weeks in the making, after White House coronavirus coordinator Deborah Birx and other officials grew frustrated with the quality of hospital data. The CDC system was viewed as a weak link in providing comprehensive, up-to-date findings; senior officials have argued it's hampered the response.
“As community spread of the virus continues, we must all improve our ability to detect disease and respond rapidly and accurately with specific interventions and therapeutics,” Birx and HHS Secretary Alex Azar wrote to governors this week, according to a copy obtained by POLITICO.
Democrats and the CDC’s defenders argue the data change is the latest move to minimize the agency, and the news “alarmed public health experts who fear the data will be distorted for political gain,” the New York Times reported on Tuesday.
Groups like the Infectious Diseases Society of America decried the change as a troubling development, and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), who chairs the House subcommittee that oversees HHS’ purse strings, charged that the health department “cannot be trusted” to share data. Trump “can try to intentionally hide the exploding number of cases, but the people will not be fooled,” DeLauro tweeted.
But is getting CDC out of Covid data collection actually a good thing? That’s the argument inside the administration and in some corners of the health sector, which note that CDC has repeatedly struggled to provide real-time data in the heart of the coronavirus crisis, and that the HHS Protect and Teletracking systems are better alternatives that draw on private sector expertise.
HHS officials maintained that CDC would continue to have access to the data at all times, adding that agency officials agreed that its system wasn’t ready to support the evolving needs of the pandemic.
“The new faster and complete data system is what our nation needs to defeat the coronavirus and the CDC, an operating division of HHS, will certainly participate in this streamlined all-of-government response,” said HHS spokesperson Michael Caputo.
It didn't even take a single day after the new policy went into effect on Wednesday for that to be exposed as a lie. Now some of the data isn't getting through at all.
But what about leakers? Certainly that will happen, right?
Don't count on that, either.
In the middle of a devastating pandemic and a searing economic crisis, the White House has an urgent question for its colleagues across the administration: Are you loyal enough to President Donald Trump?
The White House’s presidential personnel office is conducting one-on-one interviews with health officials and hundreds of other political appointees across federal agencies, an exercise some of the subjects have called “loyalty tests” to root out threats of leaks and other potentially subversive acts just months before the presidential election, according to interviews with 15 current and former senior administration officials.
The interviews are being arranged with officials across a wide range of departments including Health and Human Services, Defense, Treasury, Labor and Commerce and include the top tier of Trump aides: Senate-confirmed appointees. Officials are expected to detail their career goals and thoughts on current policies, said more than a dozen people across the administration with knowledge of the meetings.
White House officials have said the interviews are a necessary exercise to determine who would be willing to serve in a second term if President Donald Trump is reelected. But officials summoned for the interviews say the exercise is distracting from numerous policy priorities, like working to fight the pandemic, revitalizing the economy or overhauling regulation, and instead reflect the White House’s conviction that a “deep state” is working to undermine the president.
It’s “an exercise in ferreting out people who are perceived as not Trump enough,” said one person briefed on the meetings.
“If they’re spending time trying to hunt down leakers, that’s time they’re taking away from advancing an agenda,” said a former senior administration official who’s spoken with officials undergoing the interviews. “And that’s irresponsible.”
The regime is already conducting loyalty tests to stop leaks. Expect more and more COVID-19 data to disappear and for a sudden "miraculous reversal" in the rise of case numbers and attributed deaths.
Again, this was all foreseeable, preventable, and still expected. The pandemic will be "over" by the election unless hospital heads are willing to tell the truth.
Luckily, there's a massive pile of evidence that America already knows the danger.
A document prepared for the White House Coronavirus Task Force but not publicized suggests more than a dozen states should revert to more stringent protective measures, limiting social gatherings to 10 people or fewer, closing bars and gyms and asking residents to wear masks at all times.
The document, dated July 14 and obtained by the Center for Public Integrity, says 18 states are in the “red zone” for COVID-19 cases, meaning they had more than 100 new cases per 100,000 population last week. Eleven states are in the “red zone” for test positivity, meaning more than 10 percent of diagnostic test results came back positive.
It includes county-level data and reflects the insistence of the Trump administration that states and counties should take the lead in responding to the coronavirus. The document has been shared within the federal government but does not appear to be posted publicly.
Dr. Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, said he thought the information and recommendations were mostly good.
“The fact that it’s not public makes no sense to me,” Jha said Thursday. “Why are we hiding this information from the American people? This should be published and updated every day.”
Because Republicans don't want to help Americans out. Americans working for trash wages and making corporate overlords profits is all that matters.
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