How many other people in the U.S. are hospitalized with COVID-19? Who knows?

This story first made the impression in ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning research writing room. Subscribe to The Big Story newsletter for stories like this in your inbox.

In mid-July, Trump’s management asked hospitals to replace the way they reported on their coronavirus patients’ knowledge, promising that the new technique would provide better and more up-to-date data on the virus assessment and allow the availability of resources and materials. temporarily sent across the country.

Instead, this resolution created widespread confusion, leaving some states in the dark over the remaining bed and the extensive attention span of their hospitals and, at least temporarily, this data from the public. As a result, it is not known how many other people are being treated by COVID-19 in hospitals at a time when the number of inflamed patients nationwide has skyrocketed.

Hospitalizations for COVID-19 were a key measure of the coronavirus’s results and the ability of the fitness system to cope.

Since early in the pandemic, hospitals had been reporting data on COVID-19 patients to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention through its National Healthcare Safety Network, which traditionally tracks hospital-acquired infections.

In a July 10 memorandum, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services asked hospitals to replace the course, avoid disclosing their knowledge to the CDC, and sends it to HHS through a new portal through a company called TeleTracking. The replacement took effect in a few days. Vice President Mike Pence said management will continue to divulg knowledge, as did the CDC.

Almost immediately, the CDC disconnected their old knowledge, only to republish it a few days later. Meanwhile, the new management portal’s online page promised to update the figures daily, however, until Friday morning, the site had not been updated since July 23 (HHS publishes daily knowledge on another federal online page but not estimates estimates for each state)

“The maximum pernicious component is that at the state and regional level, we have lost our situational awareness,” said Dave Dillon, a spokesman for the Missouri Hospital Association. “At the end of this, we may have a product of KNOWLEDGE of HHS. I’m not going to beat them to do anything positive about knowledge, but the deployment of this was surely a disaster.”

The Missouri Hospital Association had brought the knowledge presented through its hospitals to the CDC and created a state control panel. The transition has disconnected him. The panel came back online this week, but Dillon said in a follow-up email, “knowledge is as smart as our ability to know that everyone reports the same knowledge, in the right way, for tracking and comparison purposes at the state level.”

Other states, adding Idaho and South Carolina, have also experienced transient data breaks. And the COVID follow-up project, which tracked the country-wide pandemic assessment based on state knowledge, pointed to the disorders with its figures. “These disorders mean that our knowledge of hospitalization, a measure of the COVID-19 pandemic, is, at the moment, unreliable and likely underestimated. We do not believe that state hospitalization knowledge or new federal knowledge is isolated,” as a Tuesday, blog post on the group’s website.

To further complicate the issues, the administration has replaced the data requested by hospitals, adding many elements, such as the age diversity of patients admitted to COVID-19 and cutting others. Starting this week, for example, HHS asked hospitals to avoid reporting the total number of deaths they have had since January 1, the total number of DEATHS similar to COVID-19, and the total number of income to COVID-19. (Hospitals report daily numbers, but not old figures)..

“Hospitals in Massachusetts continue to manage the dramatic accumulation of knowledge requirements,” the Massachusetts Health and Hospitals Association said in a bulletin. “The MHA and other public fitness officials continue to raise considerations about the administrative burden and questionable application of some of the knowledge.”

“Hospitals across the country have had little time to adapt and the seismic adjustments proposed through the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which fundamentally replace the volume of knowledge and the platforms through which knowledge is sent,” the association’s CEO said. Steve Walsh, he said in the newsletter.

Several state Internet sites have also reported disorders with hospital data. For days, the Texas State Department of Health Services included a note on its dashboard stating that it “reported incomplete hospitalization numbers … due to a transition in the declaration to meet the new federal requirements.” This happened at a time when the state was experiencing an increase in COVID-19-related hospitalizations.

California noticed problems.

An HHS spokesperson stated some difficulties in the transition, but said in an email: “We are satisfied with the progress we have made during this transition and the practical knowledge it provides. Some states and hospital arrangements have reported difficulties with the new collection system When HHS identifies errors in knowledge presentation, we paint them directly with the state or hospital agreement quickly.

“Our purpose with this new technique is to paint with states and the physical care system. The purpose of total transparency is to recognize discrepancies in knowledge and correct them.”

Last week, HHS noted that 93% of its list of hospitals of precedence, non-medical psychiatric, rehabilitation centers and devotees, provided knowledge at least once a week. (Advice to hospitals asks them to come every day.)

When asked about the lack of timely knowledge on its public website, HHS said it will update the site to “make estimates transparent only once a week.” HHS now publishes a daily date record in healthknowledge.gov with aggregated data on hospitalizations for conditions.

But unlike previous CDC publications, which provided response-based hospital capacity estimates, this record only provides totals for hospitals that reported knowledge. It is known which hospitals have reported, what their length is or whether the knowledge reported is representative.

You don’t know if it’s accurate, either. New York State, for example, reported that fewer than six hundred people were recently hospitalized by COVID-19 on Friday. Federal knowledge published on the same day estimated the number of suspicious hospitalizations and shown in COVID-19 to approximately 1800.

Louisiana says more than 1,500 people have recently been hospitalized by COVID-19. Federal knowledge put the figure at less than 700.

Nationally, the COVID follow-up assignment reports that more than 56,000 people were hospitalized nationwide with the virus on Thursday.

Data published through HHS on Friday put more than 70,000.

NPR reported this week that it discovered irregularities in the procedure used through Trump’s leadership to award the hospital’s knowledge control contract. Among other things, HHS directly contacted TeleTracking about the contract and the company used a procedure that is used more for cutting-edge clinical research, NPR reported.

An HHS spokesperson told NPR that the contractual procedure was a “common mechanism…” research spaces of interest, ” and said that the formula used through the CDC was “full of challenges.”

Ryan Panchadsaram, co-founder of the tracking website CovidExitStrategy.org, has been critical of the problems created by the hospital data changeover.

“Without accurate real-time monitoring, you can’t make quick, fast and accurate decisions in the event of a crisis,” he said in an interview. “It’s very important. This poor indicator shows how the fitness care formula is doing in a state.”

Dillon, of the Missouri Hospital Association, said leadership could have treated this differently. It noted that for primary generation projects there was a well-publicized transition with data sessions, an educational program and, perhaps, the control of old and new systems in parallel.

It’s “extremely abrupt,” he said. “It’s different from anything you’d expect from HHS about how a program would take effect.”

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