The C.D.C. Isn’t Publishing Large Portions of the Covid Data It Collects (NYT)
| metaman | 02/20/22 | | QueenLaBEEFah | 02/20/22 | | metaman | 02/20/22 | | lsd | 02/20/22 | | .,..,....,...,.,.,....,,....,......,......,,.,.,.. | 02/20/22 | | ..,,..,,..,,..,,.. | 02/20/22 | | .,.,,..,..,.,.,:,,:,....,::,...,:,.,.:...:.,:.::,. | 02/20/22 | | Refunkulus | 02/20/22 | | ,.,.,.,.,.,.,., | 02/20/22 | | guy who gets it | 02/20/22 | | Dunhill International Blues | 02/20/22 | | :,..,:,,;,,.,;:;,..:;,.:;,. | 02/20/22 | | ,...,.,.,.;,.;,.;.,..,.;..,.,,.,;,.,.;,., | 02/20/22 | | .,.,,..,..,.,.,:,,:,....,::,...,:,.,.:...:.,:.::,. | 02/20/22 | | ,.,...,..,.,.,;:,.:,.,.,::,,,,..,:,.,.:.:.,:.::,. | 02/20/22 | | ,.,.,.,.,.,.,., | 02/20/22 | | QueenLaBEEFah | 02/20/22 | | metaman | 02/20/22 | | ,.,;,;,.;,.;,.;,,,,;,.,; | 02/20/22 |
Poast new message in this thread
Date: February 20th, 2022 4:33 PM
Author: metaman
The agency has withheld critical data on boosters, hospitalizations and, until recently, wastewater analyses.
For more than a year, the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention has collected data on hospitalizations for Covid-19 in the
United States and broken it down by age, race and vaccination status.
But it has not made most of the information public.
When the C.D.C. published the first significant data on the
effectiveness of boosters in adults younger than 65 two weeks ago, it
left out the numbers for a huge portion of that population: 18- to
49-year-olds, the group least likely to benefit from extra shots,
because the first two doses already left them well-protected.
The agency recently debuted a dashboard of wastewater data on
its website that will be updated daily and might provide early signals
of an oncoming surge of Covid cases. Some states and localities had been
sharing wastewater information with the agency since the start of the
pandemic, but it had never before released those findings.
Two full years into the pandemic, the agency leading the
country’s response to the public health emergency has published only a
tiny fraction of the data it has collected, several people familiar with
the data said.
Much of the withheld information could help state and local
health officials better target their efforts to bring the virus under
control. Detailed, timely data on hospitalizations by age and race would
help health officials identify and help the populations at highest
risk. Information on hospitalizations and death by age and vaccination
status would have helped inform whether healthy adults needed booster
shots. And wastewater surveillance across the nation would spot
outbreaks and emerging variants early.
Without the booster data for 18- to 49-year-olds, the outside
experts whom federal health agencies look to for advice had to rely on
numbers from Israel to make their recommendations on the shots.
Kristen Nordlund, a spokeswoman for the C.D.C., said the agency
has been slow to release the different streams of data “because
basically, at the end of the day, it’s not yet ready for prime time.”
She said the agency’s “priority when gathering any data is to ensure
that it’s accurate and actionable.”
Another reason is fear that the information might be misinterpreted, Ms. Nordlund said.
Dr. Daniel Jernigan, the agency’s deputy director for public
health science and surveillance said the pandemic exposed the fact that
data systems at the C.D.C., and at the state levels, are outmoded and
not up to handling large volumes of data. C.D.C. scientists are trying
to modernize the systems, he said.
“We want better, faster data that can lead to decision making
and actions at all levels of public health, that can help us eliminate
the lag in data that has held us back,” he added.
The C.D.C. also has multiple bureaucratic divisions that must
sign off on important publications, and its officials must alert the
Department of Health and Human Services — which oversees the agency —
and the White House of their plans. The agency often shares data with
states and partners before making data public. Those steps can add
delays.
“The C.D.C. is a political organization as much as it is a
public health organization,” said Samuel Scarpino, managing director of
pathogen surveillance at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Pandemic
Prevention Institute. “The steps that it takes to get something like
this released are often well outside of the control of many of the
scientists that work at the C.D.C.”
The performance of vaccines and boosters, particularly in
younger adults, is among the most glaring omissions in data the C.D.C.
has made public.
Last year, the agency repeatedly came under fire for not
tracking so-called breakthrough infections in vaccinated Americans, and
focusing only on individuals who became ill enough to be hospitalized or
die. The agency presented that information as risk comparisons with
unvaccinated adults, rather than provide timely snapshots of
hospitalized patients stratified by age, sex, race and vaccination
status.
But the C.D.C. has been routinely collecting information since
the Covid vaccines were first rolled out last year, according to a
federal official familiar with the effort. The agency has been reluctant
to make those figures public, the official said, because they might be
misinterpreted as the vaccines being ineffective.
Ms. Nordlund confirmed that as one of the reasons. Another
reason, she said, is that the data represents only 10 percent of the
population of the United States. But the C.D.C. has relied on the same
level of sampling to track influenza for years.
Some outside public health experts were stunned to hear that information exists.
“We have been begging for that sort of granularity of data for
two years,” said Jessica Malaty Rivera, an epidemiologist and part of
the team that ran Covid Tracking Project, an independent effort that
compiled data on the pandemic till March 2021.
A detailed analysis, she said, “builds public trust, and it paints a much clearer picture of what’s actually going on.”
Concern about the misinterpretation of hospitalization data
broken down by vaccination status is not unique to the C.D.C. On
Thursday, public health officials in Scotland said they would stop
releasing data on Covid hospitalizations and deaths by vaccination
status because of similar fears that the figures would be misrepresented
by anti-vaccine groups.
But the experts dismissed the potential misuse or misinterpretation of data as an acceptable reason for not releasing it.
“We are at a much greater risk of misinterpreting the data with
data vacuums, than sharing the data with proper science, communication
and caveats,” Ms. Rivera said.
When the Delta variant caused an outbreak in Massachusetts last
summer, the fact that three-quarters of those infected were vaccinated
led people to mistakenly conclude that the vaccines were powerless
against the virus — validating the C.D.C.’s concerns.
But that could have been avoided if the agency had educated the
public from the start that as more people are vaccinated, the percentage
of vaccinated people who are infected or hospitalized would also rise,
public health experts said.
“Tell the truth, present the data,” said Dr. Paul Offit, a
vaccine expert and adviser to the Food and Drug Administration. “I have
to believe that there is a way to explain these things so people can
understand it.”
Knowing which groups of people were being hospitalized in the
United States, which other conditions those patients may have had and
how vaccines changed the picture over time would have been invaluable,
Dr. Offit said.
Relying on Israeli data to make booster recommendations for
Americans was less than ideal, Dr. Offit noted. Israel defines severe
disease differently than the United States, among other factors.
“There’s no reason that they should be better at collecting and
putting forth data than we were,” Dr. Offit said of Israeli scientists.
“The C.D.C. is the principal epidemiological agency in this country, and
so you would like to think the data came from them.”
It has also been difficult to find C.D.C. data on the proportion
of children hospitalized for Covid who have other medical conditions,
said Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics’s
Committee on Infectious Diseases.
The academy’s staff asked their partners at the C.D.C. for that
information on a call in December, according to a spokeswoman for the
A.A.P., and were told it was unavailable.
C.D.C. data. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has
published only a tiny fraction of the Covid data it has collected,
including critical data on boosters and hospitalizations, citing
incomplete reports or fears of misinterpretation. Critics say the
practice causes confusion.
Ms. Nordlund pointed to data on the agency’s website that
includes this information, and to multiple published reports on
pediatric hospitalizations with information on children who have other
health conditions.
The pediatrics academy has repeatedly asked the C.D.C. for an
estimate on the contagiousness of a person infected with the coronavirus
five days after symptoms begin — but Dr. Maldonado finally got the
answer from an article in The New York Times in December.
“They’ve known this for over a year and a half, right, and they
haven’t told us,” she said. “I mean, you can’t find out anything from
them.”
Experts in wastewater analysis were more understanding of the
C.D.C.’s slow pace of making that data public. The C.D.C. has been
building the wastewater system since September 2020, and the capacity to
present the data over the past few months, Ms. Nordlund said. In the
meantime, the C.D.C.’s state partners have had access to the data, she
said.
Despite the cautious preparation, the C.D.C. released the
wastewater data a week later than planned. The Covid Data Tracker is
updated only on Thursdays, and the day before the original release date,
the scientists who manage the tracker realized they needed more time to
integrate the data.
“It wasn’t because the data wasn’t ready, it was because the
systems and how it physically displayed on the page wasn’t working the
way that they wanted it to,” Ms. Nordlund said.
The C.D.C. has received more than $1 billion to modernize its
systems, which may help pick up the pace, Ms. Nordlund said. “We’re
working on that,” she said.
The agency’s public dashboard now has data from 31 states. Eight
of those states, including Utah, began sending their figures to the
C.D.C. in the fall of 2020. Some relied on scientists volunteering their
expertise; others paid private companies. But many others, such as
Mississippi, New Mexico and North Dakota, have yet to begin tracking
wastewater.
Utah’s fledgling program in April 2020 has now grown to cover 88
percent of the state’s population, with samples being collected twice a
week, according to Nathan LaCross, who manages Utah’s wastewater
surveillance program.
Wastewater data reflects the presence of the virus in an entire
community, so it is not plagued by the privacy concerns attached to
medical information that would normally complicate data release, experts
said.
“There are a bunch of very important and substantive legal and
ethical challenges that don’t exist for wastewater data,” Dr. Scarpino
said. “That lowered bar should certainly mean that data could flow
faster.”
Tracking wastewater can help identify areas experiencing a high
burden of cases early, Dr. LaCross said. That allows officials to better
allocate resources like mobile testing teams and testing sites.
Wastewater is also a much faster and more reliable barometer of
the spread of the virus than the number of cases or positive tests. Well
before the nation became aware of the Delta variant, for example,
scientists who track wastewater had seen its rise and alerted the
C.D.C., Dr. Scarpino said. They did so in early May, just before the
agency famously said vaccinated people could take off their masks.
Even now, the agency is relying on a technique that captures the
amount of virus, but not the different variants in the mix, said
Mariana Matus, chief executive officer of BioBot Analytics, which
specializes in wastewater analysis. That will make it difficult for the
agency to spot and respond to outbreaks of new variants in a timely
manner, she said.
“It gets really exhausting when you see the private sector
working faster than the premier public health agency of the world,” Ms.
Rivera said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/20/health/covid-cdc-data.html
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5036410&forum_id=2#43999571) |
Date: February 20th, 2022 4:36 PM
Author: QueenLaBEEFah
It’s
amazing to see 90% of what Alex Berenson has been saying since Day 1
bearing out, and about 50% of it percolating begrudgingly into the MSM
later.
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5036410&forum_id=2#43999581) |
 |
Date: February 20th, 2022 4:36 PM
Author: metaman
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5036410&forum_id=2#43999587) |
|
Date: February 20th, 2022 4:52 PM
Author: .,..,....,...,.,.,....,,....,......,......,,.,.,..
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5036410&forum_id=2#43999672) |
|
Date: February 20th, 2022 4:52 PM
Author: ..,,..,,..,,..,,..
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5036410&forum_id=2#43999675) |
|
Date: February 20th, 2022 4:54 PM
Author: .,.,,..,..,.,.,:,,:,....,::,...,:,.,.:...:.,:.::,.
"This is misinformation!" the government flak screeched.
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5036410&forum_id=2#43999685) |
|
Date: February 20th, 2022 4:55 PM
Author: Refunkulus (I Always Post Always TP)
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5036410&forum_id=2#43999698) |
|
Date: February 20th, 2022 4:55 PM
Author: ,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5036410&forum_id=2#43999699) |
|
Date: February 20th, 2022 5:39 PM
Author: guy who gets it (Cowshit disciple #1)
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5036410&forum_id=2#43999896) |
Date: February 20th, 2022 4:54 PM
Author: Dunhill International Blues
My very first thought is why is the NYT reporting this?
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5036410&forum_id=2#43999689) |
|
Date: February 20th, 2022 5:06 PM
Author: :,..,:,,;,,.,;:;,..:;,.:;,.
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5036410&forum_id=2#43999743) |
|
Date: February 20th, 2022 5:09 PM
Author: ,...,.,.,.;,.;,.;.,..,.;..,.,,.,;,.,.;,.,
As
easy as it is to hate them, NYT has been pretty good at putting out
narrative-busters on Covid. It's a large organization and there are a
few genuine reporters there.
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5036410&forum_id=2#43999756) |
|
Date: February 20th, 2022 5:22 PM
Author: .,.,,..,..,.,.,:,,:,....,::,...,:,.,.:...:.,:.::,.
CR.
NYT still does some good journalism. usually it's the middle aged white
male news reporters like michael powell (who covers lib insanity at
colleges) and paul mozur (who covers china and tech) who have a nose for
actual news and believe in objectivity, altho there aren't many of them
left. the shitlennial URM "journalists" like jamelle bouie and davey
alba and are all pozzed and painfully dumb AA hires. thank god that
taylor lorenz bitch is gone, altho now she's a columnist at the WaPo -
LOL! in the MSM, it seems, journalists just fail their way to the top
these days.
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5036410&forum_id=2#43999805) |
|
Date: February 20th, 2022 5:27 PM
Author: ,.,...,..,.,.,;:,.:,.,.,::,,,,..,:,.,.:.:.,:.::,.
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5036410&forum_id=2#43999832) |
|
Date: February 20th, 2022 5:35 PM
Author: ,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,
i find that the NYT often "circles back" to write a deep story -- long after it matters anymore.
here, they should have been on this the way Alex Bererson was -- on time, when it might have mattered.
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5036410&forum_id=2#43999875) |
|
Date: February 20th, 2022 5:40 PM
Author: metaman
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5036410&forum_id=2#43999905) |
|
Date: February 20th, 2022 5:41 PM
Author: ,.,;,;,.;,.;,.;,,,,;,.,;
(((why?)))
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5036410&forum_id=2#43999908) |
|
|
No comments:
Post a Comment