VP Mike Pence has taken the extraordinary step of asking the nation's nearly 4,700 hospitals to submit via email daily updates to a federal inbox on how many patients have been tested for novel coronavirus.
The letter also exposed serious limitations to the federal government's ability to communicate directly with states andproviders, despite being several weeks into the crisis and after years of planning by both Democratic and Republican administrations on how to prepare the nation for a pandemic flu.
Heath experts on disease surveillance and data said they were somewhat surprised the federal government didn't already have this capability, and questioned why the administration waited to set it up now. But, they acknowledged, the U.S.in a way in which care is managed by private doctors and hospitals, as opposed to state-run health care systems.
People wait in line to be tested for coronavirus while wearing protective gear, outside Elmhurst Hospital Center in the Queens borough of New York, March 30, 2020."There are modern approaches to get this data, no doubt," said John Brownstein, chief innovation officer at Boston Children's Hospital and professor at Harvard Medical School."We're not doing much better than the fax.
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