WASHINGTON, 15 July. - (ANA)  - Beginning Wednesday, US President Donald Trump’s administration ordered hospitals to bypass the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (C.D.C.) and send key virus information to a Washington database, alarming health officials.

 

From now on, the Department of Health and Human Services will collect information on patients, available beds and more data.

 

Critics fear the administration’s new system could be open to political distortion.

 

Many retailers across the United States have quietly stopped paying their employees “hero pay,” despite surging virus numbers across the country.

 

The new instructions are contained in a little-noticed document posted this week on the Department of Health and Human Services’ website, Sheryl Gay Stolberg reports. From now on, H.H.S., and not the C.D.C., will collect daily reports about the patients that each hospital is treating, how many beds and ventilators are available, and other information vital to tracking the pandemic.

 

Officials say the change will streamline data gathering and assist the White House coronavirus task force in allocating scarce supplies like personal protective gear and the drug remdesivir. Some hospital officials welcome the move, saying it will relieve them of responding to requests from multiple federal agencies.

 

But public health experts have long expressed concerns that the administration is politicizing science and undermining the disease control centers; four former C.D.C. directors, spanning both Republican and Democratic administrations, said as much in an opinion piece published Tuesday in The Washington Post. The data collection shift reinforced those fears.

 

But news of the change came as a shock inside the C.D.C., which has long been responsible for gathering public health data, according to two officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it.

 

Florida, where the virus has been surging, set a record on Tuesday for the most new deaths it has reported in a single day: 132, according to a New York Times database.

 

The record in Florida, and another set on Tuesday in Alabama, which reported 40 deaths, comes as the number of U.S. deaths has begun to rise again after weeks of declines.

 

The average number of cases reported daily in Florida has grown eightfold to 10,855 from 1,269.

 

The nation was averaging 724 deaths a day as of Monday, up from below 500 a day as July began. While deaths are up, they remain far below the more than 2,200 deaths recorded each day during the deadliest phase of the outbreak in April. But 23 states are reporting more deaths each day than they were two weeks ago, according to the database.

 

Vice President Mike Pence acknowledged the rise in virus cases during a visit Tuesday to Louisiana, which is averaging more new cases each day than ever.

 

Researchers at Harvard estimated that nearly 110,000 small businesses across the country had decided to shut down permanently between early March and early May, based on data collected in weekly surveys by Alignable, a social media network for small-business owners.

 

According to a New York Times database, California, Florida and Texas had reported a total of at least 892,000 cases through Monday, when there were at least 30,000 new cases recorded across the three states. 

 

The pandemic stripped an estimated 5.4 million American workers of their health insurance between February and May, according to a new analysis. The study, by the nonpartisan consumer advocacy group Families USA, found that the estimated increase in uninsured workers was nearly 40 percent higher than the highest previous increase, during the recession of 2008-9, when 3.9 million adults lost insurance.

 

The U.S. budget deficit grew to a record $864 billion for June as the federal government pumped money into the economy to prop up workers and businesses affected by the pandemic, the Treasury Department said.  - (ANA) -

 

AB/ANA/15 July 2020 - - -