Trump admin orders hospitals to bypass CDC and send COVID-19 info to Washington database closed to public

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.

The Trump administration is ordering hospitals around America to bypass the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, and send COVID-19 info to a database that is not open to the public, with access to reporters and researchers unlikely and unclear.

Here's the official order.

Beginning on Wednesday, hospitals are told they must send all Covid-19 patient information to a central database in Washington, rather than the CDC.

This is highly unusual, and the New York Times reports The move has alarmed health experts who fear the data will be politicized or withheld from the public.

From Sheryl Gay Stolberg at the New York Times:

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.