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Political interference, disorganization and years of forgetfulness in controlling knowledge of public fitness mean that the country is flying blindly
South Korea’s control over the coronavirus weakened this month when a giant church in Seoul had an outbreak, involving 915 cases as of August 25. The government has reinstated restrictions in the city to an increase, but it is also publicly revealing the main points of the outbreak. . For example, he shared that 120 other inflamed people in the church spread coronavirus to others at 22 sites, adding four call centers and 3 hospitals in Seoul.
Nearly one or both days in the more than seven months, the Korean Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have updated their online page with near real-time data on local outbreaks. The site also reports several COVID-19 statistics for both regions of the country.
Data panels in Singapore and New Zealand will offer similar windows on how coronavirus spreads within its borders. This helps policy makers and citizens discover how to live their daily lives, while eliminating threats and providing researchers with a wealth of knowledge. On the other hand, the United States will offer very few details about how the disease spreads, even as others socialize and increasingly, and the government reopens schools and businesses. This is frustrating for knowledge researchers, who need to help the government make life-saving decisions.
“We fly blindly at this point,” says Natalie Dean, biostatistics at the University of Florida at Gainesville. “We have to speculate.”
Experts told Nature that political interference, privacy issues, and years of forgetting public fitness surveillance systems are among the reasons for data scarcity in the United States.
Although data are not the only tool that can be used to oppose a pandemic, South Korea’s attention to knowledge correlates with its overall good fortune in controlling the epidemic: the country has recorded about 3.5 cases in line with another 10,000 people in total, and there have been about 2 COVID-19 deaths consistent with the week of the following month. By contrast, the United States reported 175 cases matching another 10,000 people in total, and about 7,000 more people died from the disease in the week of the following month.
South Korea owes its detailed data to a coordinated network of public gyms in 250 districts that temporarily send data to the Korean Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Sung-il Cho, an epidemiologist at Seoul National University, attributes the good luck of the system to this centralization of power, as well as to the immediate hiring of “temporary epidemiologists” to attend the call for the COVID-19 pandemic. These scientists helped conduct research on tactile studies that produce succinct and unnamed details, such as indexes on the epidemic at Sarang Jeil Church in Seoul.
The U.S. does not seek contacts for COVID-19 to the same extent as South Korea, however, its disease surveillance also shifts from local fitness facilities to the federal level. For years, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has used this formula to track the spread of epidemics, such as the existing outbreak of Salmonella infections, and to tell them their sources. However, the surveillance formula found disorders to varying degrees of the pandemic. The result is that there is a lot of knowledge, such as missing data on where other people have been exposed to coronavirus. And the knowledge that exists is only slowly made public.
CDC and 4 U.S. fitness departments They have refused to tell Nature how they deal with COVID-19’s knowledge. However, previous clinical staff and researchers working with them have put together tips on why knowledge is lagging behind and absent in the United States.
Some say that because the pandemic has a political burden, the knowledge describing the scenario is largely monitored by officials in President Donald Trump’s administration. Researchers say the surveys published in the CDC’s Weekly Morbidity and Mortality Reports have been extensive, but are published online long after they only influence the results. For example, on July 31, the CDC reported that 260 employees and youth at a night camp in Georgia had become inflamed more than a month earlier. Samuel Groseclose, a public fitness expert who retired from the CDC in 2018, suggests that the reports are the subject of a rare review within the agency and, in all likelihood, from its parent agency, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
The CDC was sidelined in July, according to scientists, when Trump management announced that knowledge about COVID-19 instances and hospitalizations would deviate from the company and be dealt with instead through a new formula introduced in HHS, which the official reports directly. to the president. To date, the HHS dashboard has taken a week to report knowledge and includes only data on the number of instances and the capacity of the hospital, as well as key points such as the location of disease groups. A HHS spokesman said the new formula streamlines reports at 6,000 hospitals across the country.
But Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association (APHA) in Washington, D.C., says that instead of streamlining knowledge gathering, substitution has altered knowledge collection. Some hospital directors no longer know which company to be responsible for, he says. He is also frustrated that the $10 million spent on the HHS formula may have been more used to control public knowledge about fitness at the CDC and in the fitness departments he works with across the country. This superseded formula has been deformed under the stress of 5.7 million COVID-19 instances in the United States.
Benjamin notes that many fitness facilities still show a percentage of knowledge through faxing, which takes longer than virtual methods. Lack of budget also means that overworked staff do not have enough time to analyze the knowledge they have. APHA and other clinical organizations have long called for resources for knowledge surveillance in the U.S. public fitness formula. In a report published last September, public aptitude epidemiologists described the existing formula as compartmentalized, slow, manual, and role-like.
“We have asked for cash over the years to build a strong data path so that we can temporarily collect knowledge and share it with others who want it at the right time,” Benjamin says. “But they never gave us what we wanted.”
This long-standing forgetfulness has been exacerbated by the lack of national leadership of the pandemic, the researchers who spoke to Nature say. There is no national data requirement that hospitals and testing laboratories must provide to fitness services. Ranu Dhillon, an outbreak reaction specialist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, which lately treats other inflamed people with COVID-19 in Vallejo, California, says neither the local fitness branch nor the CDC tells him to report where patients might have been. exposed to the coronavirus. You voluntarily record this knowledge in your medical records, however, it is not certain that the state or local fitness branch is using this data, which disturbs them. He worked on Guinea’s reaction to Ebola to the 2015 outbreak, and said the Guinean government had gathered knowledge of how others were inflamed with Ebola to prevent its spread. “This very important data would help us deepen the transmission” of COVID-19, he said. “It’s crazy that we don’t get them together.”
Amy Lockwood, a public fitness specialist who left the San Francisco California Department of Health this year, says many departments would like to have that knowledge but have trouble getting it from hospitals or labs that offer controls. She says some check providers do not collect data such as a person’s career because they are concerned that asking such questions deters others from being controlled. Some hospitals, on the other hand, record this data but do not transmit it to the research lab where the samples are monitored. Therefore, when the lab stores a case with a fitness service, the report does not have those details. “Having a fragmented fitness formula prevents us from what’s going on with COVID,” Lockwood says.
University epidemiologists would like to help overburdened state and local fitness facilities analyze their knowledge so they can help officials lead an effective reaction to coronaviruses. In general, fitness facilities have a percentage of knowledge about disease surveillance with researchers on demand. But during the COVID-19 pandemic, he refused access to epidemiologists. For example, Steffanie Strathdee, HIV epidemiologist at the University of California, San Diego, requests knowledge of cases that are damaged based on parameters such as locality, race, and probably the direction of exposure, such as intravenous drug use. “Tracking is done and transparent, and that’s what we’re used to,” he says. “Just because of this epidemic, things have changed.”
This year, Strathdee and other epidemiologists requested anonymous information about COVID-19 from the California Department of Health. Emails viewed through Nature show that requests from researchers took into account the need for individual privacy with measures such as asking the state for age teams rather than precise ages. But the request was denied, which had never happened before in Strathdee. The department’s director, Mark Ghaly, explained in an email on July 3 that the disclosure of data from individual records “would require careful and lengthy investigation of each of the records in which the fields of knowledge of each individual report can be made public.”
In addition, the United States produces little data through touch search, a procedure that has the strength to locate an epidemic and how it moves, as well as to inform others who want to be quarantined. Through touch research, Singapore’s daily report of 25 August was able to say that 94% of the new instances were shown in dormitories, as domestic staff are connected to known instances, and that the maximum number of new instances has occurred in others who are already quarantined. By contrast, the Washington DC Department of Health reported last week that only about 5% of new cases in the city were similar to others in the past known as infected.
Without up-to-date and reliable data on who is infected, why and where scientists, policy makers, and the U.S. public rely on media reports and independent efforts to consolidate data, such as The Atlantic Magazine’s COVID Tracking Project and COVID-19 Chart of Indicators compiled through researchers at Johns University in Hopkins Baltimore. Maryland. But the first is not fully or universally reliable, and the timing does not specify where the transmission occurs. There is an urgent need for such data, says Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins, because other people return to work, socialization and school. This means that adapted interventions are more vital than ever. “It’s not enough to tell other people to be careful.”
This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on August 25, 2020.
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