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Government Medicine United States

White House Reportedly Orders Hospitals To Bypass CDC During COVID-19 Data Collection 189

The Trump administration is now ordering hospitals to send coronavirus patient data to a database in Washington, DC as part of a new initiative that may bypass the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), according to a report from The New York Times published on Tuesday. The Verge reports: As outlined in a document (PDF) posted to the website of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), hospitals are being ordered to send data directly to the administration, effective tomorrow, a move that has alarmed some within the CDC, according to The Times. The database that will collect and store the information is referred to in the document as HHS Protect, which was built in part by data mining and predictive analytics firm Palantir. The Silicon Valley company is known most for its controversial contract work with the US military and other clandestine government agencies as well as for being co-founded and initially funded by Trump ally Peter Thiel.

"A unique link will be sent to the hospital points of contact. This will direct the [point of care] to a hospital-specific secure form that can then be used to enter the necessary information. After completing the fields, click submit and confirm that the form has been successfully captured," reads the HHS instructions. "A confirmation email will be sent to you from the HHS Protect System. This method replaces the emailing of individual spreadsheets previously requested." While the White House's official reasoning is that this plan will help make data collection on the spread of COVID-19 more centralized and efficient, some current and former public health officials fear the bypassing of the CDC may be an effort to politicize the findings and cut experts out of the loop with regard to federal messaging and guidelines, The Times reports.
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White House Reportedly Orders Hospitals To Bypass CDC During COVID-19 Data Collection

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  • Slashdot coders versus one misplaced curly boi }
  • by Applehu Akbar ( 2968043 ) on Thursday July 16, 2020 @09:43PM (#60298625)

    If hospitals are emailing the figures as spreadsheets, why not just beam it to the CDC and CC the HHS?

    • I've been wondering the same myself, and haven't been able to find a good answer to it. I presume the expectation is that the new White House mandate will call for the data in a specific format that is different from what was used by the CDC, which would mean that whomever is responsible for it at the hospital would need to reformat the data to send it both places. While this job would almost certainly not go to a health care worker, it would still eat up more time and resources so the hospitals would lik
      • > data in a specific format that is different from what was used by the CDC, which would mean that whomever is responsible for it at the hospital would need to reformat the data to send it both places.

        Yes, they've been needing to report the same data in two completely different formats.

        Two different formats to send it two different offices within HHS. (CDC is part of HHS).

        I believe it was toward the end of March that the COVID database was brought online. That's now THE database to enter covid cases, ra

        • and why would the CDC not have access to this data to present it to the public?

          • Yeah I don't know why anyone would think that.
            CDC is still publishing it daily, as always:
            https://www.cdc.gov/coronaviru... [cdc.gov]

            I guess anything the administration does, someone has to use a breathless tone of voice to try to make it sound sinister. Gets them clicks, I guess.

            Kinda like today the White House Press Secretary said:

            --
            The science should not stand in the way of this, as Dr. Scott Atlas said 'Of course, we can do it. Everyone else in the Western world, our peer nations are doing it. We are the outlier

            • Yes, because children can't infect their grandparents or antibody else. /sarcasm

              • by kenh ( 9056 )

                The science doesn't support the infection spread from children to parents/grandparents, and besides, we've kept grandparents away from parents and grandchildren For several months - is there some reason we would suspend that precaution for our most-at-risk population when we open up elementary schools?

                • The science doesn't support the infection spread from children to parents/grandparents

                  You are part of the problem, asshole
            • The science is very clear on this.

              Uh huh. No surprise that this administration would start lying about science instead of merely denying it.

              Very little is "very clear" about COVID yet. For example: we know that a large number of infections have no visible symptoms, but we now have multiple studies showing a significant number of these asymptomatic patients with inflammation and lesions in their lungs. Including children. The long term effects of this lung damage are unknown, and so the declaration that COVID is less dangerous than the fl

          • and why would the CDC not have access to this data to present it to the public?

            Because the HHS document released on 15 July has a line (p. 10, at the end of the Answer to "Question 2: Capacity and utilization data: where/how to submit?") that says:

            As of July 15,, [sic] 2020, hospitals should no longer report the Covid-19 information in this document to the National Healthcare Safety Network site. Please select one of the above methods to use instead. (The original is underlined.)

            The National Healthcare Safety Network [cdc.gov] (NHSN) has been the nation’s most widely used healthcare-associated infection tracking system for decades, receiving data from more than 25,000 hospitals, dialysis centers, long care centers, etc., and is the standard method by which health care institutions report public health information. T

          • They do. This is BeauHD. You expect clarity and honesty why?
          • The CDC has this data all along but they always report 2 days behind not live numbers. In the least developed countries like Vietnam they provide live status update. We pride ourselves as the leading technology country in the World and our pandemic report is 2 days old. Why did you think the President wants the report to go directly to the WH now?
        • If you wanted the same data in both databases, one could simply bulk export/import the data, which will take a DB admin several minutes to do the whole thing, rather than having hospitals apend hours typing it up redundantly.

          And as a bonus, any edits ordered by the White House would be made before the export, preventing any troubling inconsistencies in the data!

          MUCH more efficient that way.

          It's probably not the case that this is the reason. It may not even happen. It's also very sad that the scenario I describe is entirely plausible. IMO, politically-sensitive data should always be sent to at least two places, and one of them should be a non-governmental watchdog organization. Of course, who would have thought that hospita

    • by evil_aaronm ( 671521 ) on Thursday July 16, 2020 @09:54PM (#60298643)
      Technically? There's absolutely no reason why it can't go 20 different places, for all that that matters. Politically? You can't control the narrative if you don't control the information you don't want the public to see. (aka "the truth").
      • It's still published daily on the CDC site.

        https://www.cdc.gov/coronaviru... [cdc.gov]

        Hospitals just don't have to type it in twice and send it to HHS twice, using two different forms for two offices in HHS.

        I'm not sure how " if you don't control the information you don't want the public to see" applies to data that it still openly published every day as always. It's just being pulled from one database instead of being duplicated in two different databases that are probably in the same HHS datacenter.

    • by bloodhawk ( 813939 ) on Thursday July 16, 2020 @10:28PM (#60298701)
      If it goes to 2 places it is much harder to manipulate the data for political purposes without getting caught.
    • Ask the white house who said only one place.

    • It IS being sent to multiple agencies, but by way of a data collection at Health and Human Services (CDC's parent agency) first. Here's a data-scientist view summary of the changes [statnews.com].

      The part that you aren't seeing in these headlines is that hospitals are generally happy with this, because instead of being required to send data to three different agencies (CDC, HHS, state), using different formats and protocols, they only have to submit once - in a format explicitly designed for COVID tracking - and then all

    • Because trump has made it very clear he wants the numbers to go down no matter how many people are infected and die.
      Having control of this data is one step in doing so.
      The White House doesn't have the staff to handle additional data, much less specialized data. That's why the CDC was created in the 1st freaking place!
  • Am i going mad? (Score:4, Informative)

    by kpoole55 ( 1102793 ) on Thursday July 16, 2020 @09:54PM (#60298641)

    Or is this the third time I've seen this particular news item posted here?

    • by labnet ( 457441 ) on Thursday July 16, 2020 @10:00PM (#60298651)

      /. is currently broken.
      I imagine there is some code monkey trying to understand commander tacos 15 year old crusty code, currently posting on stackoverflow for help.

      • /. is currently broken.

        Actually, my guess is it got hacked - and this is the result of restoring the latest good backup.

        The timing is interesting, what with Twitter getting pwned at the same time...

        • Actually, my guess is it got hacked - and this is the result of restoring the latest good backup.

          They must have done more than that. Last good backup for stories would look to be maybe 2-3 days old. But today, ... I see replies to my comments in the box on the right. That functionality hasn't worked for me for a solid 2 years despite having been enabled in my profile. Unless the last backup they took from the Slashcode was when they last changed the UI 6 years ago.

    • by antdude ( 79039 )

      Look at the date. /. lost recent stories like yesterday!

    • Why can't it be both?
  • It's like I've lived this moment before only yesterday!
  • So I guess we can expect vastly improved numbers in the next week or are they still allowing the CDC the raw unmanipulated numbers as well?
    • I imagine the transition to good numbers will be more gradual, so as not to appeaer too obviously ham-handed.

      But I wonder how long it will be before hospitals are ordered not to talk to the press...

      • You are talking about the same fools that tried to redraw a weather map with a sharpie in an attempt to back up their b.s. you know...

        Sure, there do seem to be some sycophants stupid enough to believe that, but the majority of this country aren't that stupid.
  • by Revek ( 133289 ) on Thursday July 16, 2020 @10:49PM (#60298729)
    If you won't be lie for us then we will just replace you with a private corporation that will tell any lie we want.
  • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Thursday July 16, 2020 @10:50PM (#60298731)
    it's exactly what he did. Also he took down the info on hospital capacity from the CDC website today even though parts of Florida (Miami-Dade) are now at 100% ICU capacity.

    He doesn't care about you or me. I don't know what to say anymore to his supporters when they're seeing stuff like this and still love the guy. His poll numbers have barely budged and there's every likelihood he'll be re-elected.

    There's no bridge too far. He was right about one thing, he's shooting 1000 Americans a day in Main Street USA and he's getting away with it.
  • by Dr. Tom ( 23206 ) <tomh@nih.gov> on Thursday July 16, 2020 @10:57PM (#60298745) Homepage
    I doubt that. Trump can barely count. There's no way he could control an entire database, that's ludicrous.
    • You don't need to count to control the numbers. Just employ someone who can count and then repeatedly fire them and replace them over and over until someone who can count gives you the answer you're looking for.

      Basically what Trump has done with every position in the White House.

  • by slack_justyb ( 862874 ) on Thursday July 16, 2020 @11:22PM (#60298783)

    So here's my question. This wondrous portal just appears? I mean, let's look at who we are talking about. The Government. So does anything think this "portal" is actually going to be better code than the ETL scripts that the CDC has spent at least a decade or better tweaking? Really? The Government suddenly write perfect code?

    That's also overlooking the fact that the White House has been using Excel's cubic approximation charting tool [businessinsider.com] to do COVID numbers. No real mathematical model, a fucking Excel function...

    If anything, this is more than likely some dumb ass LAMP toss together by Jared after reading "Learn PHP in 24 Hours", with the backing database fucking Excel and the reporting done in...well, Excel actually. I'm betting that if someone popped the letter "A" into one of the number entry forms the entire "database" would just read that day as zero COVID cases.

    I mean seriously everyone. Does anyone think this portal wasn't some half ass job done up? When did everyone on Slashdot suddenly start thinking that the Government could do anything right? Especially technical in nature? I mean here you go. This new portal is literally the systemd of disease reporting. It's some new shiny thing, hasn't been well tested, will more than likely break a 100 times, and it's by people who want everyone to use it by hook or crook no matter what you liked before. Why are some of you cheering it on?

    • The new system was built by TeleTracking and Palantir after following the proper procurement processes. TeleTracking specializes in patient data flows. They have the medical expertise, AKA hospital integration knowledge. Palantir is a multi-billion dollar maker of big data analytics, with a bunch of successful government contracts, and whom Biden has previously praised in public for their great work for various agencies. They have some of the best large scale database expertise in the world.

      So uh, you're totally wrong in your made-up suppositions?

      Some hospitals used to email spreadsheets to report data to the CDC and HHS. The CDC hasn't been able to keep up, being at best a week behind. This system replaces all that crap in order to provide real-time data. Yeah, it's better. It's also been running fine collecting data from hospitals for the HHS since April, so it's not as brand-new as people seem to think. After the CDC said they couldn't provide daily data and hospitals complained about the duplication of efforts they recently stopped requiring them to provide a duplicate subset of data to the CDC. Now the CDC can just get a data feed instead.

      It's all perfectly normal and logical, until people inject their TDS into it and start injecting their conspiracy theories and conjectures like yours without even looking at the facts available.

      • until people inject their TDS

        99% of this article's threads.

      • The problem is, Trump presents himself as a compulsive liar. He's been catalogued and recorded telling 20,000 lies. Certainly not all of those lies are meaningful, and certainly some are projections of wishful thinking. However, a vast swath of those lies are deeply important. By simple objective measurement, he is the most well documented liar in the history of the world. In the thousands of years of recorded history that we possess, no other human has ever achieved such a vast record of falsehoods.
      • Some hospitals used to email spreadsheets to report data to the CDC and HHS. The CDC hasn't been able to keep up, being at best a week behind. This system replaces all that crap in order to provide real-time data. Yeah, it's better.

        Please stop spreading this nonsense. It damages the public health of the nation, something that is unpatriotic and un-American.

        The CDC's National Healthcare Safety Network [cdc.gov] has been the nation’s most widely used healthcare-associated infection tracking system for decades, receiving data from more than 25,000 hospitals, dialysis centers, long care centers, etc., and is the standard method by which health care institutions report public health information of all types.

        "Some hospitals used to email spr

      • Wow! It's almost like the conversations we used to have on Slashdot before the ignorant herds arrived in mass. :)

        I'll try to enjoy it while it lasts, which probably won't be very long at all.

        So, is anyone going to speculate on what version of *nix they are or should be running?
  • Obvious solution (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DarkVader ( 121278 ) on Friday July 17, 2020 @12:04AM (#60298847)

    Obvious solution: Ignore the idiots in the white house. Keep sending the data to the CDC.

    By the time anything even gets to court Biden will be president.

    • You're laboring under a bunch of misconceptions.

      The hospitals have always been sending data to HHS (Specifically, the Medicare division, who pays for all the covid-related stuff and runs this database). They just also sent a subset to the other HHS division called the CDC as well. The CDC couldn't keep up with it, being at best a week behind. Once CDC admitted that they couldn't improve that without redoing their system while the hospitals kept complaining about the extra duplication and work, they agreed t

    • by kenh ( 9056 )

      Hey idiot, isn't the CDC part of HHS?

    • by kenh ( 9056 )

      By the time anything even gets to court Biden will be president.

      Really? You think it will take 5 years to work its way through the courts?

      BTW, have you heard Biden's commercials? He swears to stand by our side and help us get through the current crisis... He forgets to mention he can't do jack for about 6 more months! I guess Biden is hoping the pandemic stays around killing Americans for six more months, just so he can show us how he would handle it.

      • I guess Biden is hoping the pandemic stays around killing Americans for six more months, just so he can show us how he would handle it.

        Biden is dumb as a stump, but he's still smarter than Trump. He's smart enough to listen to experts, who told him that Covid would still be a problem in six months because Trump and "My face my right" dumbshits are collaborating to fuck up America.

        • Marks of a good manager. Knows how to delegate, and how to listen.

          • by DogDude ( 805747 )
            Yeah, I don't doubt that Biden is slipping a bit. He wasn't my first choice. Still, I'm confident that he's going to bring back much of the Obama team and other well-qualified individuals to re-fill all of the top slots in the federal agencies that are really hurting (us) right now.
      • I guess Biden is expecting the pandemic stays around killing Americans for six more months, just so he can show us how he would handle it.

        FTFY.

        And if that's what Biden is expecting, he's completely right. No way the pandemic has ended in six months.

      • by DogDude ( 805747 )
        ... what do you think is going to happen in the next six months, exactly?
      • Biden sucks and is an asshat at best.
        Sadly, that still ranks him leagues above trump.

        Yes, the pandemic will still be raging in the US in 6 months due to the incompetence of the douche canoes in the upper reaches of the government now, especially considering the orange buffoon in the WH.

        We could have a long discussion as to why this is, or you can just look at the status and steps taken by various other countries and their current pandemic status for comparison, or you can always just keep screaming incohere
    • You go right ahead running that pre-victory lap. I'm pretty sure you'll see Hillary out there still chugging away.

      • by DogDude ( 805747 )
        I couldn't give two shits about "victory". This isn't some stupid game.

        I just want this country to start working much better as soon as fucking possible. I'm so tired of all of this shit.
  • With so many dishonest things going on with the opposition party, I can understand why the President would want to see the reports directly himself. Who's to say the other party didn't cook the number they received from the hospitals, prior to submitting the aggregated number to CDC?

    What I'm hoping to see is the same number. But if the number does happen to be different by a high margin, I want to see heads roll beause this is the lives of our Americans we're talking about. It's not something to be used
    • I want to see heads roll beause this is the lives of our Americans we're talking about. It's not something to be used as a political tool.

      Interesting... What do you think should be done in response to Russia putting bounties on American troops? Ignore it? Maybe call the evidence a hoax?
      • Shall we also mention all the claims of hoax, and it'll go away, and there'll soon be no cases, and all the other lies that this administration has been trying to feed us?
        The medical profession isn't lying to us, medicine isn't political.
        You should really try to open your eyes and look at facts.
        I say that, but I know it's probably futile. You are so wrapped up in your 'side' that you can't think rationally anymore.
  • It is all to funnel tax dollars to a couple of Trump's mega-donors:

    https://www.facebook.com/heath... [facebook.com]

"If there isn't a population problem, why is the government putting cancer in the cigarettes?" -- the elder Steptoe, c. 1970

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