As the world experiences new, more transmissible Covid-19 variants, scientists and health officials in the U.S. are still struggling to gather accurate and timely domestic data to help inform policy decisions to safeguard Americans
A person is tested for Covid-19 inside Los Angeles International Airport on Dec. 01, 2021. | Mario Tama/Getty Images.
Meanwhile, other Western countries have tapped into their modern health systems that can easily track patient data and seamlessly share epidemiologic information across a broad spectrum of health care facilities and public health departments.
“It will be very important that we identify ways to have sustainable support for these non-categorical activities like data modernization,” Jernigan said. “That's something that we look to our partners in Congress to identify how best to support the ongoing need for maintaining a good data infrastructure.”
“There's a lot of data that's coming in from a lot of different places. It's coming in from the U.K., it's coming in from Israel, it's coming in a lot from South Africa, which is ahead of the rest of the world in the experience they're having with Omicron,” Fauci said. “We've gotten virus either in the live virus form or in the pseudo virus form.
Health advocates, scientists, doctors and health officials have long highlighted the importance of improving U.S. public health data systems and ensuring they more accurately predict and manage the spread of diseases and viruses. But with diminishing federal funding, state health officials said they have struggled to make the necessary improvements to their data systems — improvements that would withstand the crush of a pandemic. When Covid-19 emerged in the U.S., those data systems failed.
The CDC has allocated funding to states and public health labs across the country to ramp up genomic sequencing efforts. That effort seems to be paying off. With the outbreak of the Omicron variant in the U.S. this month, state health departments in Washington and New York received samples and detected the variant in less than 48 hours — a far shorter period of time than the weeks it took some labs during the height of the pandemic.
“We have been a hole in public health and under invested in over the decades, we cannot delude ourselves to think that one time investments will be enough to regain the footing for public health across the country,” said Umair Shah, secretary for health in the state of Washington. “We must have strategic, smart, sustainable funding.
State health departments have improved one piece of their surveillance process by setting up a system whereby labs could send in results electronically to state health offices, allowing officials there to crunch data more efficiently. But that effort could not withstand the deluge of Covid-19 cases. At the federal level, the CDC could not visualize how Covid-19 was spreading across the country because it relied almost entirely on the states to provide it with epidemiological data. The CDC requires every state to report specific virus and disease information to its scientists who then study the data, track trends and create policy recommendations based on their analyses.
“As Covid-19 spread through the country a year ago, we saw the devastating result of decades of underinvestment,” Frieden said in his May 2021 testimony. “Our nation had a patchwork of underfunded, understaffed, poorly coordinated health departments and decades out-of-date data systems — none of which were equipped to handle a modern-day public health crisis.”
Despite the uncertainty about the vaccine’s effectiveness and the future severity of breakthrough infections, the CDC made the decision to stop tracking all breakthrough infections and instructed state health departments to do the same.would only track breakthrough infections that led to severe disease
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