White House tells hospitals to bypass CDC on Covid-19 data reporting | Hacker News Reader

White House tells hospitals to bypass CDC on Covid-19 data reporting

thehill.com

72 pointsanigbrowl8 comments

This is extremely dangerous to our democracy. Literally.

How does this affect the data behind the COVID-tracking sites like John Hopkins CSSE [1] or COVID Tracking [2]. Seems like there's a lot of cross-sharing (and web-scraping) of data between these sites (per [3] CDC gets some of their data from [4]), so not immediately obvious which data is ultimately sourced from CDC vs other primary sources (such as state and local govt Web sites in [5]).

[1] https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html and https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19

[2] https://covidtracking.com

[3] https://towardsdatascience.com/a-short-review-of-covid-19-da...

[4] https://coronavirus.1point3acres.com/en

[5] https://covidtracking.com/about-data/sources

> Hospitals will begin sending coronavirus-related information directly to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), not the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), under new instructions from the Trump administration.

> ...

> But the move comes amid concerns that the White House has been sidelining the CDC and after Trump administration officials attacked Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert and a member of the White House coronavirus task force.

That motive doesn't make sense. Fauci doesn't work for the CDC, he works for NIH, a branch of HHS. If anything, the move is bringing Fauci closer to the process, not further.

> The National Institutes of Health (NIH) (/ɛn.aɪ.ˈeɪtʃ/) is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It was founded in the late 1880s and is now part of the United States Department of Health and Human Services.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Institutes_of_Health

Also: Pop-unders? Really?

> That motive doesn't make sense. Fauci doesn't work for the CDC, he works for NIH, a branch of HHS. If anything, the move is bringing Fauci closer to the process, not further.

It saddens me that a change like this is met with (I assume) widespread cynicism. I'm sad that it seems justified.

> That motive doesn't make sense. Fauci doesn't work for the CDC, he works for NIH, a branch of HHS. If anything, the move is bringing Fauci closer to the process, not further.

I think the concerns are less about getting further away from Fauci and more about that the Trump administation has very publicly stated that they want to reduce the coronavirus numbers by simply slowing down testing. This is another move to obfuscate the actual numbers of the pandemic in the US because it makes his administration look bad.

Given that he's been attacking public health officials and anything that makes the pandemic look like, well, a pandemic, the cynicism I think is valid.

>That motive doesn't make sense. Fauci doesn't work for the CDC, he works for NIH, a branch of HHS

I think you're reading too much into the quoted bit.

It's not that Fauci works for the CDC, it's that the administration is/was attacking both, in a way seems to be related to random political concerns and resentments rather than legitimate issues or logic.

As such, one may doubt anything they do regarding shifting responsibilities around. Framing the situation as if everything is pro- or anti-Fauci is kind of playing into the warped outlook of the administration at this exact moment. It won't last as it never does.[1]

[1]Granted Fauci is not an appointee, but https://www.newyorker.com/cartoons/daily-cartoon/wednesday-j...

I dunno, frustration with the CDC has been pretty bipartisan. Remember back in February when they delivered a bunch of faulty tests?

Pretty sure people remember that. There was bipartisan frustration about the tests. Are there other times that the frustration was bipartisan and not because the CDC is another source of truth that the administration wants to silence so that their narrative of the Coronavirus isn’t contradicted?

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