Q: How low can he go? A: Pretty low!

This morning I heard an outrageous report on NPR; a few hours later, Kevin Perry emailed me a link to the written article. I’ll let you read the article, but the gist of it is that the Department of Homeland Security compiles daily data on hospital utilization rates, ventilator use, etc. for the entire country. But this data is only made available to state governments, and even then only for their state. For the rest of us – including researchers, planners in other states, etc. – weekly summaries need to suffice.

Now why would DHS (the most compromised government agency, in my opinion, and that’s saying a lot nowadays. I would write at the bottom of their sign “A wholly owned subsidiary of Trump and Putin, Inc.”) not be doing all they can to get this data out, you might ask (perhaps laughing sardonically)? Here’s one clue from the article:

This kind of visibility into data could help policymakers decide how best to curb the spread of the virus. McPheeters and colleagues at Vanderbilt put out a report this week that found that Tennessee counties without mask mandates had more rapid increases in hospitalizations. That kind of analysis and insight would be possible at a much larger scale if HHS shared more granular hospitalization data, she says.

In other words, they don’t want the data to be used to...you know...protect people. God forbid the government should do that! Why, Mark Meadows has made it clear that isn’t the federal government’s job anymore. It’s simply to protect the “vulnerable” (with no particular specifics on how that will be accomplished, and certainly no additional money!), while letting the rest of us try to fight off the virus (or not) the best we can.

But there’s another problem: The data are questionable now, since the CDC scientists – who used to review data from hospitals and discuss possible errors with the hospitals before correcting them – were taken out of the loop altogether in July; now, they just get to see the data, period.

And the quality of the underlying data is a concern. Health experts say the data quality was compromised by a controversial shift in data collection from the CDC to HHS in July, and that the issues with data quality have not been fully resolved.

Hospitals have had to adjust to onerous new reporting requirements, and the hospital data is no longer checked and analyzed by seasoned epidemiologists and other experts at CDC.

But don’t worry:

The daily trend documents circulated at HHS include this disclaimer: "This analysis depends on the data reported by hospitals. To the extent that the data is missing or inaccurate, this analysis will also reflect those issues."

Yes sir, the DHS officials have learned the number one survival tactic since time immemorial in DC: always find someone else to blame for problems that might be attributed to you. And they’ve added another: Always do what Trump wants, no matter how deleterious it might be to the country’s health and wellbeing.

I would love to hear any comments or questions you have on this post. Drop me an email at tom@tomalrich.com.