Trump administration to recommend National Guard as option to help hospitals report coronavirus data
From the excellent Heather Cox Richardson’s daily missive.
Snip
Today, after repeatedly changing instructions, officials from the Department of Health and Human Services finalized new data reporting protocols for hospitals. The new system will eliminate the CDC as a recipient of data. Instead, health-care institutions will report information about infections to a federal contractor or to their state, which will turn the information over to the federal government. The argument for the change is that the data has been faulty, but hospitals maintain they are delivering the best information they can as the government keeps changing the reporting system.
But there is another layer to this change, as well. The administration wants the states to call out the National Guard, sending troops to hospitals to help with data collection. Originally, the request was going to be a demand, but it got watered down over the weekend. HHS general counsel Robert P. Charrow opposed the decision. He wrote in emails to an HHS official, “I believe that using National Guard troops to gather these data would be counter-productive…. As a practical matter, I cannot imagine how the National Guard would be able to collect data at the hospital itself nor the number of Guards who would be exposed to COVID-19 in the process.”
President of the American Hospital Association Rick Pollack told Washington Post reporters Lena H. Sun and Amy Goldstein, “Given our track record of being cooperative to evolving data requests, it’s perplexing that the possibility of using the National Guard has been suggested…. It makes no sense. Certainly the expertise of the National Guard can be used in a more productive way.”
Source
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/07/13/trump-administration-recommend-national-guard-an-option-help-hospitals-report-covid-19-data/
= new reply since forum marked as read
Nothing suspicious there, noooooo.
