Coronavirus Sars-CoV-2/Covid-19 Megathread

[Sophie Scholl]

I would like to believe they still will, but... look at states lining up to feed data to the Census Bureau to enact Trump's citizenship information ideas that were shot down by the courts. What should happen in a sane world and what is happening in our world have diverged too often for me to take anything for granted.

[celedhring]

The Catalan government has started a testing drive among agricultural and farm workers in the locked down areas in the Aragon-Catalonia border. So far they have carried out 6.000 tests, and according to the regional health minister "over 25% came back positive".

Also, the mayor of Barcelona has said that there will be some restrictions enacted in the city. There's been a small outbreak in L'Hospitalet, a Barcelona suburb that's one of the most densely populated areas in Europe.

[Tamas]

I like how the first reaction is always "OMG unwashed immigrants were too stupid to follow instructions and caused local outbreak" no matter the country. But when it is proven partially true (the immigrant part) it turns out it is because they were kept as slaves, practically.

[Sheilbh]

I like how the first reaction is always "OMG unwashed immigrants were too stupid to follow instructions and caused local outbreak" no matter the country. But when it is proven partially true (the immigrant part) it turns out it is because they were kept as slaves, practically.

Yeah - all of these sectors fast-fashion, fruit-pickers, meat-packing have dreadful working conditions and labour rights that socially we've just decided not to care about.

Similar with the dorms in Singapore. In an ideal world it would lead to reform of working conditions, but it won't.

[Tonitrus]

England's implementation of the mask-in-shops requirement does seem kind of ass-backward...wouldn't it make more sense to come out and require it immediately with a grace period on enforcement (presumably to allow to people to get a mask, if they haven't already)?

[Tamas]

England's implementation of the mask-in-shops requirement does seem kind of ass-backward...wouldn't it make more sense to come out and require it immediately with a grace period on enforcement (presumably to allow to people to get a mask, if they haven't already)?

What is important to understand is that the entire British government is made of people scraped off the bottom of the party pool. Everyone else have been purged for being a Remainer and/or wasn't stupid enough to take on the kind of Brexit the lunatics are forcing on the country

[Sheilbh]

England's implementation of the mask-in-shops requirement does seem kind of ass-backward...wouldn't it make more sense to come out and require it immediately with a grace period on enforcement (presumably to allow to people to get a mask, if they haven't already)?

I think you have to give people notice if they have to go and buy something to get into the shops.

Also, and this may be nonsense, but I can see a grace period from the police but shops have legal obligations around health and safety. If they don't enforce a rule like that then they're probably opening themselves up to civil claims and I can't see how a grace period from official enforcement would affect that.

[Admiral Yi]

Can't one just pull a shirt up over your nose?

[Syt]

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/us/politics/trump-cdc-coronavirus.html

Trump Administration Strips C.D.C. of Control of Coronavirus Data

Hospitals have been ordered to bypass the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and send all patient information to a central database in Washington, raising questions about transparency.

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration has ordered hospitals to bypass the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and send all Covid-19 patient information to a central database in Washington beginning on Wednesday. The move has alarmed health experts who fear the data will be politicized or withheld from the public.

The new instructions were posted recently in a little-noticed document on the Department of Health and Human Services website. From now on, the department — not the C.D.C. — will collect daily reports about the patients that each hospital is treating, the number of available beds and ventilators, and other information vital to tracking the pandemic.

Officials say the change will streamline data gathering and assist the White House coronavirus task force in allocating scarce supplies like personal protective gear and remdesivir, the first drug shown to be effective against the virus. But the Health and Human Services database that will receive new information is not open to the public, 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.

"Historically, C.D.C. has been the place where public health data has been sent, and this raises questions about not just access for researchers but access for reporters, access for the public to try to better understand what is happening with the outbreak," said Jen Kates, the director of global health and H.I.V. policy with the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation.

"How will the data be protected?" she asked. "Will there be transparency, will there be access, and what is the role of the C.D.C. in understanding the data?"

News of the change came as a shock at the C.D.C., according to two officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter. Michael R. Caputo, a Health and Human Services spokesman, called the C.D.C.'s system inadequate and said the two systems would be linked. The C.D.C. would continue to make data public, he said.

"Today, the C.D.C. still has at least a week lag in reporting hospital data," Mr. Caputo said. "America requires it in real time. The new, faster and complete data system is what our nation needs to defeat the coronavirus, and the C.D.C., an operating division of H.H.S., will certainly participate in this streamlined all-of-government response. They will simply no longer control it."

But the instructions to hospitals in the department guidance are explicit and underscored: "As of July 15, 2020, hospitals should no longer report the Covid-19 information in this document to the National Healthcare Safety Network site," the C.D.C.'s system for gathering data from more than 25,000 medical centers around the country.

Public health experts have long expressed concerns that the Trump administration is politicizing science and undermining its health experts, in particular the C.D.C.; four of the agency's former directors, spanning both Republican and Democratic administrations, said as much in an opinion piece published Tuesday in The Washington Post. The data collection shift reinforced those fears.

"Centralizing control of all data under the umbrella of an inherently political apparatus is dangerous and breeds distrust," said Dr. Nicole Lurie, who served as assistant secretary for preparedness and response under former President Barack Obama. "It appears to cut off the ability of agencies like C.D.C. to do its basic job."

The shift grew out of a tense conference call several weeks ago between hospital executives and Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator. After Dr. Birx said hospitals were not adequately reporting their data, she convened a working group of government and hospital officials who devised the new plan, according to Dr. Janis Orlowski, the chief health care officer of the Association of American Medical Colleges, who participated in the group's meetings.

While she said she understood Dr. Lurie's concern, Dr. Orlowski said the administration had pledged in "a verbal discussion" to make the data public — or at least give hospitals access to it.

"We are comfortable with that as long as they continue to work with us, as long as they continue to make the information public, and as long as we're able to continue to advise them and look at the data," she said, calling the switch "a sincere effort to streamline and improve data collection.''

The change exposes the vast gaps in the government's ability to collect and manage health data — an antiquated system at best, experts say. The C.D.C. has been collecting coronavirus data through its National Healthcare Safety Network, which was expanded at the outset of the pandemic to track hospital capacity and patient information specific to Covid-19.

In its new guidance, Health and Human Services said that going forward, hospitals should report detailed information on a daily basis directly to the new centralized system, which is managed by TeleTracking, a health data firm with headquarters in Pittsburgh. However, if hospitals were already reporting such information to their states, they could continue to do so if they received a written release saying the state would handle reporting.

Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the Senate health committee, has raised questions about the TeleTracking contract, calling it a "noncompetitive, multimillion-dollar contract" for a "duplicative health data system."

Both the C.D.C. network and the TeleTracking system set up by Health and Human Services rely on so-called push data, meaning hospital employees must manually enter data, rather than the government tapping into an electronic system to obtain the information.

"The whole thing needs to be scrapped and started anew," said Dr. Dan Hanfling, an expert in medical and disaster preparedness and a vice president at In-Q-Tel, a nonprofit strategic investment firm focused on national security. "It is laughable that this administration can't find the wherewithal to bring 21st-century technologies in data management to the fight."

Dr. Hanfling and others agree that information does need to be centralized, but they disagree on how that should happen. Dr. Hanfling called for a new "national data coordination center" that would be used for "forecasting, identifying, detecting, tracking and reporting on emerging diseases."

Representative Donna E. Shalala of Florida, who served as health secretary under former President Bill Clinton, said the C.D.C. was the proper agency to gather health data. If there were flaws in the C.D.C.'s systems, she said, they should be fixed.

"Only the C.D.C. has the expertise to collect data," Ms. Shalala said. "I think any move to take responsibility away from the people who have the expertise is politicizing."

Hospitals say the previous reporting requirements were cumbersome, partly because they frequently changed.

"It has been an administrative hassle and confusing to constantly be shifting gears on reporting while hospitals are on the front lines during a pandemic," Carrie Williams, a spokeswoman for the Texas Hospital Association, wrote in an email.

At Rush University Medical Center in Chicago as the pandemic raged, the hospital had four full-time employees reporting coronavirus data to four different agencies, said Dr. Bala N. Hota, the hospital's chief analytics officer. Rush collected more than 100 different measures, some of which determined how much money it would receive under different federal programs.

But while Dr. Hota said he supported streamlining the process and the involvement of state and local agencies in reporting, he was also concerned that months into the pandemic, the United States still did not have an established system of collecting the kind of information it needed to seamlessly move patients from a full hospital to one with available beds.

"The C.D.C. is the right agency to be at the forefront of collecting the data," Dr. Hota said.

The C.D.C. has been criticized for its data collection, however. In May, the agency acknowledged that in tracking the spread of the virus, it had been combining tests that detect active infection with those that detect recovery from Covid-19. That system muddied the picture of the pandemic but raised the percentage of Americans tested as President Trump was boasting about the number of tests the United States was conducting.

Similar complaints about coronavirus data have bubbled up around the country.

In Florida, a former data manager for the Health Department accused one of her superiors of directing her to "manipulate" data used in the state's plan to lift stay-at-home orders this spring. Ms. Shalala said the mayor of Miami-Dade County "was so concerned about the state data that he has the hospitals reporting their data directly to him as well."

And Arizona ended its partnership with a university modeling team whose projections showed a rising caseload, prompting pushback from Will Humble, the executive director of the Arizona Public Health Association and a former director of the state's Health Services Department.

"Trust and accountability and transparency — all three go together," Mr. Humble said. Of the federal government's new system, he said: "They'd better keep it transparent, or else people are going to think that it was an ulterior motive."

[Zoupa]

That's not how virii work.

Makes me curious, are you claiming that viruses don't evolve over time? Or that is is impossible for them to evolve into less lethal forms? Or perhaps that the time span is too short?

The time span is too short. The decreased death rate is relatively expected. The most vulnerable are already gone.

[celedhring]

I think it's just sample bias. Most countries now have more robust testing programs and many mild/asymptomatic cases that were previously undetected are now getting caught, driving observed mortality down.

[Tonitrus]

England's implementation of the mask-in-shops requirement does seem kind of ass-backward...wouldn't it make more sense to come out and require it immediately with a grace period on enforcement (presumably to allow to people to get a mask, if they haven't already)?

I think you have to give people notice if they have to go and buy something to get into the shops.

Also, and this may be nonsense, but I can see a grace period from the police but shops have legal obligations around health and safety. If they don't enforce a rule like that then they're probably opening themselves up to civil claims and I can't see how a grace period from official enforcement would affect that.

That is why I phrased the idea as a question.  Good point.   

[Razgovory]

Madness. Utter madness. 
"Hospital data on coronavirus patients will now be rerouted to the Trump administration instead of first being sent to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Health and Human Services confirmed to CNN on Tuesday."
"The Times said hospitals are to begin reporting the data to HHS on Wednesday, noting also that the "database that will receive new information is not open to the public, 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.""

https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/14/politics/trump-administration-coronavirus-hospital-data-cdc/index.html?fbclid=IwAR2NodWLI2Q3e6gfDL1T9I917zkIJOAGdZvUhQM0CeCNBaCvVxsb6Tu8d9Q

We are kind of moving from incompetence to malevolence.

[Razgovory]

Governor of Oklahoma was just diagnosed with Covid.

[The Larch]

It's quite impressive to see how the death rate has plumetted over here.