The Data Disaster in the U.S.

Florida posted a wreck gird number of virus deaths for a second straight day, Arizona's infection rate jumped, and in Texas, Hurricane Hannah came ashore Saturday and knocked out power to more than three hundred thousand homes and businesses. New coronavirus guidelines for line crews, along with flooding are complicating efforts to turn the lights back on. Some in the region, maybe without power for a week. Russia plans to register

are coronavirus vaccine as soon as August ten. That would clear the way for what would be the world's first official approval of an inoculation The drug, developed by Moscow's Gamalaya Institute and the Russian Direct Investment Fund, may be approved for civilian use within three to seven days of registration by regulators. The information comes from a person familiar with the process who asked not to be identified because

the information is in public. Finally, in most places, so called herd immunity won't be achieved before a vaccine is widely available. But in some of India's largest slumps, around six and ten people have antibodies for the novel coronavirus, indicating they had the virus and recovered. That means the country's poorest areas have one of the highest population immunity

levels worldwide. And now for today's main story, more than a month into a resurgence of the novel coronavirus that has besieged Sun Belt states, flooded hospitals, and strained public health infrastructure, the US still lacks a complete picture of the reality on the ground. That's because the US doesn't have any official real time system to track the virus is spread. At times, even the federal government has had

to rely on third party databases. I talked to reporter and a court who explained the danger of a COVID data black hole. What are some of the problems we're seeing with the US specifically with regard to tracking virus data. The reality is that the United States doesn't have a good national, real time public picture of COVID nineteen in the country even today. It's sort of staggering when you say it out loud, but for the people who are monitoring this crisis every day, this is just a reality

of the situation. There isn't a accessible real time system to track the virus is spread in this voy. A lot of other tools have cropped up from third parties and things like that. You know, JOHNS Hopkins has become a big source of a lot of coronavirus data. But the real issue, and you know, there's been a lot of attribution of failures during this crisis to the Trump administration, and they've certainly played a role in this. But I

see this as confluence of different factors. We've had decades of neglect of the technological public health infrastructure in this country, and there's this history of federalism, of states taking their own approaches to different things, including public health data, and the result is this sort of crisis that's been exacerbated in many ways by the strategy taken by the Trump administration, which has been each state is going to do their own thing, and data is such an essential component of

whether you can reopen, whether it's advisable to reopen. The government admits that they have big gaps in data reporting. A lot of experts have turned in the void of really reliable federal system to the different state dashboards. So I think many of us have become familiar with this. You can log on I'm in New York. You can log on and see what New York's numbers are that day,

how things are changing. But each state also reports data very differently, and so you can't necessarily cobble together all of these fifty different state dashboards, for instance, and get a national picture that is really comprehensive, because everyone talks about the numbers a little differently, they measure it a little differently, and there's just so much variation in this data.

You know, what are some of these variations or differences in reporting that make it so difficult to get a comprehensive national picture, especially when we're looking at how the

states are reporting things differently. What's interesting is this nonprofit called Resolved to Save Lives actually took a deep dive into the US and they looked at all the different state dashboards and they looked at they basically came up with this list of fifteen essential data points and how ideally you would want to be tracking these measures like new cases, deaths, and hospitalizations. And after they went through the ways each state did this, they found what they

described as an information catastrophe. They found that even these metrics people are often turning to, like new cases, hospitalizations, and deaths, weren't reported in a standard manner. An example of this is, for instance, in Florida, until recently, they weren't reporting new hospitalizations each day. They were reporting cumulative hospitalizations each day. And that may not seem so difficult. I mean, you can look at the numbers from before,

and you can do the math. But the result is that you can't easily grab fifty sets of state data and combine them and get a really good picture of what's going on. And also, you know, it takes time to dive into these numbers and understand what their implications are. And so if each state is reporting numbers slightly differently, that makes it harder to understand what's happening in that state, just off the top. And the big issue here is

the public knowledge. Right, public health officials in these states have access to data. The problem is, we've seen so many errors be made that it's important to have this public accountability so the public can understand, for instance, how the state is managing the local conditions, but also understand is it safe for me right now to be going

out in my community. And these are important things that have major implications for how people lead their lives, what level of risk they expose themselves to, and it matters. I want to turn now, maybe to the federal level. It seems that hospitals have been told not to send virus data to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention the CDC, but instead to the U. S. Department of Health and Human Service. Is now, I was hoping you might explain why would there be this change in the

middle of the pandemic of where this data was sent. Yeah, so in some ways, the reason this change was made really has to do with these data issues. So you know, when they made this change a couple of weeks ago, the agency said the idea was to streamline the system and better present what they what data they had, and what data they didn't have. UH. And this is data that has really important implications. That helps you know, the agencies decide where to send things like medical supplies. Right.

It helps inform the government's response. But the concern was the CDC is the public premier public health agency in this country. Their job is to maintain public databases like this. They have worked with data like this for years. You know, this is what they do. And the concern is are you taking the data away from the agency that knows how to deal with the data and is there some

politics involved here? The CDC is viewed as being having been largely cut out of the us is response to COVID nineteen, And the question is is this data is still going to be available to the public. Are we going to get a better system here or is the system going to become even less transparent than it was before. Uh And I think it's important to know. The HHS perspective on this is this is a way of being

more transparent. We're making even more data available UH. And there are gaps in our data reporting, but we are sharing what the gaps are through this new data system. Let's let's look at this in a broader international context. How does the US is UM approach to tracking virus data compare to what some other countries are doing worldwide. What's really striking about the patchwork system we have here in the United States is that other countries have made

their data more accessible in one place. So right now I could log on to South Korea's c d C and see, you know, information about their testing efforts, information on a daily basis about what's happening in that country. Australia is also a very large country, like the US, has a similar system set up as well, and to be sure, in many parts of the world there are issues with how they've handled the COVID response, But in some ways what's happened in the US is very surprising

from an international perspective. You know that we're a country that's gotten involved in public health all around the world. We have the pharmaceutical companies are that are developing all these COVID vaccines, many are based here in the United States. So in some ways, the US is thought to have been a world leader in health crisis specifically, and it's not just data where our reputation is suffering, but it's certainly a part of it. That was Emma Cord And

that's it for our show today. For coverage of the outbreak from one and twenty bureaus around the world, visit bloomberg dot com slash Coronavirus and if you like the show, please leave us a review and a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's the best way to help more listeners find our global reporting. The Prognosis Daily Edition is produced by Toph Foreheads, Jordan Gaspore, Magnus Hendrickson and me Laura Carlson. Today's main story was reported by Emma Court.

Original music by Leo Sigrian. Our editors are Rick Shawn and Francesca Levi. Francesca Levi is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. Thanks for listening, l