Trump Administration Orders Hospitals to Send Covid-19 Data to Them Instead of the CDC

A new series of reports indicate that hospitals will be required to send data about their coronavirus patients to the Trump administration instead of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

On Tuesday, The New York Times reported that the Trump administration has ordered hospitals to bypass the CDC and forward all Covid-19 patient information to a central database in Washington. Officials claim the move will streamline data for the White House coronavirus task force and help them on matters like the allocation of medical supplies.

“The Health and Human Services database that will receive new information is not open to the public,” the Times reports, “which could affect the work of scores of researchers, modelers and health officials who rely on C.D.C. data to make projections and crucial decisions.”

CNN followed up on the Times’ report and they received confirmation from Michael Caputo, the HHS’ assistant secretary for public affairs.

“The CDC’s old hospital data gathering operation once worked well monitoring hospital information across the country, but it’s an inadequate system today,” Caputo said. While Caputo is a known coronavirus denialist, he went on to defend the new arrangement by saying 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. They will simply no longer control it.”

The development raises questions about whether the Trump administration will use the data for some kind of political spin, and CNN chief medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta warned that the decrease in transparency presents other problems as well.

“What logic does this have, other than to take away the data from the epidemiologists that are the best in the world at looking at this data, making sense of it, translating it for people, versus giving it to HHS,” he said.