By Charles Piller
Jul. 16, 2020 , 2:20 PM
... “In 4 months of the epidemic, collecting millions of records, no one in California or at the CDC [U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] has done the basic epidemiology.” Other states also fail to share highly specific information for their COVID-19 cases, which some scientists warn is hampering efforts to identify targeted measures that could stem the spread of SARS-CoV-2 without full-scale lockdowns.
Bhatia and other epidemiologists, in California and across the country, are especially aggrieved after recent news reports revealed states are feeding the same data they desire to a federal contractor, Palantir Technologies, that has drawn criticism for data work supporting Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportations. For a data platform dubbed HHS Protect, Palantir is aggregating information on the spread of the new coronavirus on behalf of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), drawing on more than 225 data sets, including demographic statistics, community-based tests, and a wide range of state-provided data.(This week, sparking widespread concern among public health experts, epidemiologists, and others, HHS also directed hospitals to provide data on COVID-19 cases and patient information to the Palantir system—largely via a second contractor, TeleTracking Technologies—rather than to CDC as they have for decades ...
Aggregated COVID-19 case and death data by county, and often by age and race, is publicly available in much of the country. But few locales link those cases and deaths to other information typically collected on the individuals, such as their ZIP codes, occupations, living conditions, and known contacts with others ill with COVID-19. And according to the COVID Tracking Project, a volunteer organization launched by The Atlantic, no U.S. state or territory publicly provides a complete set of even such basic COVID-19 measures as total and pending tests; deaths and recovered patients; and current and cumulative hospitalizations, patients in intensive care units, and those using ventilators.
Bhatia and colleagues say detailed COVID-19 case data could be mined to find the combinations of factors most responsible for the “biggest bundles of hospitalizations and deaths.” He hypothesizes the data would, for example, confirm that even as commerce opens up, hospitalizations and deaths still primarily emerge from widely cited flashpoints, including elderly care facilities and large households that include infected essential workers who are asymptomatic or have mild symptoms and pass the disease to relatives who have risk factors making them more vulnerable to severe illness ...
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/07/us-epidemiologists-say-data-secrecy-covid-19-cases-cripples-intervention-strategies
= new reply since forum marked as read
