The ongoing IG investigation highlights the CDC’s focus on gathering accurate racial and ethnic data on Covid-19 as a way to better understand how the pandemic is affecting Americans. Communities of color suffered an excessive mortality rate during the pandemic. More accurate scores can influence the decision of federal officials to reallocate resources or target outreach efforts.
The survey also highlights the gap between the federal government’s and state health agencies’ data collection efforts – a topic that has plagued officials in the CDC and elsewhere in the administration, including in the White House, and in the wider public health space for months. Accurate racial and ethnicity data are crucial to documenting the toll of the pandemic – and to ensure that the government’s response is fair, officials said.
“To some extent, the federal government can do just as much to collect that kind of data,” one senior administration official working on Covid-19 data told POLITICO. ‘We need to rely on the statements and the systems and platforms they use to collect. And you also get the question about how you get more people to answer such questions when they come for a test or shot. ‘
The collection of accurate and relatively complete race and ethnicity data has long been a public health problem. One 2016 study compared five different databases containing data on cancer patients diagnosed at two hospitals, and found that the availability of race and ethnicity data varies wildly – from 28.1 percent in one record system to 99.9 percent in another .
The reasons for these problems are complex. Data can be lost if it is transferred from suppliers to statements. Some patients may not want to give doctors information about their race and ethnicity, and some doctors may not want to peek or guess a patient’s background.
But the collection of such data became more critical during a pandemic that hurt people of color excessively. According to the CDC’s data – which is the most complete of all, with 74 per cent of deaths – black and Hispanic people die at rates higher than their share of the population. Public health experts believe that such data, from cases to vaccinations, is needed to determine which communities need targeted interventions.
Continued attention to the problem with missing data has led to limited progress. Early in the pandemic, perhaps three-quarters of coronavirus cases are missing. By the summer of 2020, it had improved to about 50 percent of cases, but progress has faltered since then. The availability of race and ethnicity data for vaccine recipients was determined at a similar level.
The HHS IG probe is representative of a larger discussion surrounding the agency’s data collection methods, officials said.
Over the past few months, senior officials, working on vaccinations, deaths and life expectancy data, among others, have held a series of meetings on the need for the agency to modernize its systems. The focus has emerged at various times within the agency over the past decade, officials said, but as the Covid-19 pandemic began, the gaps in reporting became clearer.
Officials said the Inspector General’s office first unveiled the idea of race and ethnicity in December, when the country experienced a surge in Covid-19 cases, just weeks before the federal government begins vaccination.
Up to that point, the CDC had struggled to keep up with the number of cases, tests, and deaths associated with Covid-19. At one point during a resurgence of new cases during the summer of 2020, the agency fell a few weeks behind in calculating deaths because states did not report their scores to the federal government, according to a senior official from the CDC who was familiar with the situation. .
The situation continues until 2021. Early in the new year, the CDC was five weeks behind in updating its Covid-19 mortality rates, the senior CDC official said. During the Trump administration, HHS officials tried to persuade the CDC to change the way it works with states to collect Covid-19 data, saying it takes too long and is too often inaccurate.
The result was the HHS Protect data platform. Instead of hospitals submitting their data via the CDC, the HHS Protect system forced them to submit their data manually to TeleTracking, a private contractor that received a bid from HHS to develop the HHS Protect system. . CDC officials said they were cut outside the reporting process and therefore could not ensure the data was accurate.
The Government Office is also preparing a report on the CDC’s data collection methods. It is part of a broader look at the diverse and often confusing way in which the federal government follows Covid-19 and its impact on Americans. Officials told POLITICO that the report likely recommended that the CDC and HHS summarize their data on the pandemic.