The CDC Awards $260M Contract for Disease Surveillance | Hacker News Reader

The CDC Awards $260M Contract for Disease Surveillance

reclaimthenet.org

31 pointsLinuxBender10 comments

Here's a link to the original announcement:

https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2023/p0922-disease-modeli...

> While some entities monitor factors like viruses detected in waste water, others scoop up data from health insurance companies, healthcare providers, local health departments, and some even gather data from individual search histories, personal communications, social media posts, and health records.

I don't see any mention of waste water monitoring in either the announcement or on the CDC's details page, though I assume that would be part of any national disease monitoring program.

I also don't see any mention of the CDC monitoring your personal communications and search histories, and I assume that would NOT be part of any national disease monitoring program.

This whole article feels like FUD about a (in my opinion) much-needed and valuable federal program.

> I also don't see any mention of the CDC monitoring your personal communications and search histories, and I assume that would NOT be part of any national disease monitoring program.

I suspect it's referring to fairly mundane things like Google Trends, which has already been used (fairly unsuccessfully) to monitor flu: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Flu_Trends

Or reviews for Yankee Candles on Amazon: https://www.npr.org/2022/10/17/1129542486/what-yankee-candle...

As someone involved, yes, wastewater is included, though its a trickier data source to work with than people make it out to be. health insurance claims are the newest source I'm most excited for, though they're hard to work with for privacy reasons.

The sibling speculating about google search trends is right. Though we also did facebook surveys for a while. A lot of effort is put into making sure nothing that's possibly identifiable is present, so characterizing this as about tracking people is... pretty dumb.

Health insurance claims lag behind encounters by varying amounts of time, sometimes days to weeks. So, they aren't necessarily a great way to monitor rapidly emerging public health issues. But certainly better than nothing.

Unsurprisingly, "disease surveillance" is actually surveillance of people and their behaviors.

The U.S. government already has the capabilities described for early-detection systems. This is a social media surveillance project.

as someone involved in this project, we really, really don't. disease reporting is an absolute mess

Coming from somebody who has $260M reasons to say so.

As if one Dev would make that money. I'm definitely making below market rate at this gig. if I were interested in fleecing public money I'd have taken the defence contractor's offers.

I did health tech for 10 years.

You can make a very profitable business out of consuming HHS datasets, clean up the many data problems, and selling the cleansed datasets to public health researchers. The HHS' most coveted datasets given to a select few every year are just as terrible by the way.

You're far overestimating what they know.

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