The pandemic requires a cutting edge, data-driven national health response. What are many public health officials using? Fax machines and paper records.
The situation was causing alarm even before the coronavirus arrived. Health officials frequently hit dead ends investigating reports of food-borne illness that came days after the fact. "If they come to you [and] ask say, what was in your refrigerator 14 days ago, you can guess" how useful the response is, said Laura Conn, a CDC official working on a project to create seamless, electronic case reports.
“Virtually every health department’s affected by this, in some fashion,” said Chesley Richards, the agency's deputy director for public health science and surveillance.to identify who's sick and where after a surge of coronavirus testing early this spring. That means officials have to work long hours just to establish family histories of patients or other medical conditions they may have. The delays often leave investigators flying blind, without a clear sense of how sick patients are or how quickly the disease took hold.
The heart of the problem is a cumbersome, paper-based system that contact tracers rely on to find infected people and that health authorities scrutinize to gauge how fast disease is spreading and where. Many providers simply don’t fill out reports — though it’s difficult to tell how often. And the potential for information gaps not only plagues individual case reports but “syndromic surveillance,” an important public health tool that can, for example, lumps anonymized data on how many patients had flu-like symptoms in an emergency department.
paper. That’s already slowed down the response to the pandemic: Emails obtained by ProPublica show the CDC put out a call in February for employees to comb through forms describing suspected cases of the coronavirus.
Canada Latest News, Canada Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Reopenings bring new cases in South Korea, virus fears in ItalyThe new flareups — and fears of a second wave of contagion — underscored the dilemma authorities face as they try to reopen their economies.
Read more »
Coronavirus live updates: NY ahead of virus for the 1st time, Cuomo saysNEW: A member of Vice Pres. Mike Pence's staff has tested positive for COVID-19, press secretary Kayleigh McEnany confirms, marking the second positive case reported in the White House in two days.
Read more »
China played down the virus, but did the WHO?Public health experts say the pandemic has exposed weaknesses of the World Health Organization, which has no authority to force foreign governments to divulge medical information or open doors to its hospitals and labs.
Read more »
Virus cases rise in China, South Korea; Obama bashes TrumpROME (AP) — Both China and South Korea reported new spikes in coronavirus cases on Sunday, setting off fresh concerns in countries where local outbreaks had been in dramatic decline. Former...
Read more »