On January 6, the HHS published updated guidelines on which information hospitals provide to the agency. The guidelines note the “retirement of fields which are no longer required to be reported,” among which is “Previous day’s COVID-19 deaths.”
The guidelines note, “This field has been made inactive for the federal data collection. Hospitals no longer need to report these data elements to the federal government.” This change goes into effect February 2.
The move by the Biden administration to weaken the reporting of COVID-19 deaths has direct precedents in the Trump administration. The House COVID Subcommittee’s 2021 year-end report said “Trump Administration officials purposefully weakened CDC’s coronavirus testing guidance in August 2020 to obscure how rapidly the virus was spreading across the country.”
Although the new HHS guidelines were issued on January 6, they were not made known until publicized by Dr. Jorge A. Caballero, a medical doctor and Clinical Instructor at Stanford university, on Twitter.
On Friday afternoon, Dr. Caballero wrote, “I’d love to understand why the federal government will no longer require hospitals to report the daily number of #COVID19 deaths as of February 2nd”
READ FULL ARTICLE: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/01/15/hhhs-j15.html
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