COVID-19 Data Dispatch

Tag: Hospitalization

  • HHS releases data on new admissions, staffing shortages

    HHS releases data on new admissions, staffing shortages

    How many people in the U.S. are currently hospitalized with COVID-19? As of yesterday, 83,200.

    This question calls attention to the people deeply impacted by the pandemic—people in hospital beds, on ventilators, struggling to breathe. But it is also a deeply practical question. Public health experts and policymakers need to know where hospitals are becoming overwhelmed with patients in order to distribute supplies where they are most needed. Researchers and data nerds like myself, meanwhile, can use hospitalization metrics to track the pandemic’s impact on different communities: reported cases may be an unreliable metric, challenged by inadequate testing and uneven reporting guidelines, but it’s hard to miss a person in the hospital.

    Longtime readers may remember that this newsletter started because of hospitalization data. Back in July, when hospitalization data moved from the purview of the CDC to the HHS, I wanted to explain why these data are so important and how the change in control impacted the numbers themselves. In the months since, the HHS has increased both the number of hospitals reporting to its system and the volume of information that is publicly released about those hospitals.

    I’m returning to the topic now because the HHS has made two major upgrades to its hospitalization dataset in the past week: it now includes new admissions and staffing shortages for every state. The metrics are only available at the state level; I’m hoping that county- and even individual hospital-level numbers may be released in the coming weeks.

    New admissions are a useful metric because they provide a clear picture of where outbreaks are worsening, and by what degree. Patients may stay in the hospital (and be counted in a “current hospitalizations” figure) for weeks on end; isolating the number of new patients incoming allows public health researchers to see how the burden on hospitals is growing.

    Across the U.S., over 10,000 patients with confirmed cases of COVID-19 are now being admitted each day.

    New COVID-19 admissions rose from about 6,000 per day in late October to over 10,000 per day in mid-November. Full-size chart available here.

    Staffing shortages, meanwhile, are a useful metric because they demonstrate where in the country healthcare systems are hardest hit. The HHS specifically asks hospitals to report when their staffing shortages are critical, meaning that these facilities are in serious danger of being unable to operate as normal. Staffing shortages may be the result of healthcare workers feeling burnt out, quitting, or becoming sick with COVID-19 themselves.

    As of November 19, the most recent date these data are available, 18% of hospitals are currently facing a critical shortage—that’s about 1,100 out of the 6,100 hospitals reporting. 200 more hospitals report that they will be facing a critical shortage in the next week.

    In North Dakota, Wisconsin, Missouri, and New Mexico, over one third of hospitals are facing a critical staffing shortage. Full-size chart available here.

    Finally, here’s a look at the nation’s current hospital capacity—that is, how many hospital beds are currently occupied with sick people. As of November 19, about 600,000 of the nation’s 980,000 hospital beds are full (61%). 88,000 of those people have been diagnosed with COVID-19 (9%). These numbers will grow in the coming weeks as thousands of recently diagnosed Americans become sicker.

    Across the Midwest and South, several states have over three quarters of hospital beds occupied. Full-size chart available here.

    For more context on these hospitalization data and what they mean for the exhausted, terrified healthcare workers serving patients, check out:

    more hospitalization data

  • Sources and updates, Nov. 1

    The sources listed here are included in my source list, along with all featured sources from past issues.

    • Detailed hospitalization data go unreported: A new story by NPR’s Pien Huang and Selena Simmons-Duffin reveals county-, city-, and individual hospital-level reports which the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) circulates internally but does not post publicly. HHS’s public reports on hospital capacity only include data at the state level. According to Huang and Simmons-Duffin’s reporting, more local data and contextual information such as per capita calculations and time series would be incredibly useful for the public health experts who are trying to determine where aid is most needed. The NPR story also notes that hospital compliance is low: only 62% of U.S. hospitals had sent HHS all the required information in the week prior to October 30.
    • HHS Protect has expanded: For a few months now, the HHS Protect Public Data Hub has only hosted COVID-19 hospitalization data. But recently, the website expanded to include a section on national testing. Users can clearly see cumulative PCR testing numbers from the country, download the full dataset, and read documentation. This dataset has been publicly available on healthdata.gov since July, but through hosting it on the HHS Protect Public Data Hub, the agency has made it more easily accessible for Americans who are not data nerds like myself.
    • Daily testing needs: A new tool from the Brown School of Public Health helps users calculate how many tests are needed for key essential groups, both for the nation overall and state-by-state. The tool is intended for public health leaders and policymakers who are starting to scale up as antigen tests become more widely available. For example, New York would need 37,300 tests a day to screen all college and university students.
    • Pennsylvania’s antigen tests: On October 14, Pennsylvania started distributing antigen test kits to health centers, nursing homes, and other facilities throughout the state. The facilities receiving tests are reported by the state in weekly lists. I wanted to share this because it’s a great example of testing transparency; though if Pennsylvania adds antigen tests to their dashboard, their reporting will be even more comprehensive. For more information on why state antigen test reporting is important—and how states have failed at it so far—see my COVID Tracking Project blog post from last week.
    • COVID holiday FAQs: Epidemiologists from Boston University, the University of Alabama, Birmingham, and the University of Miami have compiled their responses to common concerns around the holiday season. The questions included range from, “How do I talk to friends and family members about COVID and the holidays?” to, “Is it important to get my flu shot?” (P.S. It is. Get your flu shot.)
    • COVID-19 in ICE detention centers: Since March 24, researchers from the Vera Institute of Justice have been compiling data from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on COVID-19 cases and testing in immigrant detention centers. The researchers note that ICE replaces previously reported numbers whenever its dataset is updated, making it difficult to track COVID-19 in these facilities over time.
    • Eviction Lab: Researchers fromPrinceton University compile data for this source by reviewing formal eviction records in 48 states and the District of Columbia. Although the source’s most recent state-level dataset is as of 2016, the group is also tracking COVID-19-related evictions in real time for a select group of cities. Houston, TX, at the top of the list, has seen over 13,000 new eviction filings since March.
    • HHS celebrity tracker: Here’s one more piece of HHS news, this one more lighthearted. This week, POLITICO’s Dan Diamond released an HHS document called the “PSA Celebrity Tracker,” which health officials were using to determine which of America’s favorite people may be useful in an ad campaign encouraging the nation to be less negative about COVID-19. (Here’s more context from POLITICO on the tracker.) Alec Baldwin, for example, is listed as a celebrity who appeals to the elderly, with the additional note: “interested but having a baby in a few weeks.” Lin-Manuel Miranda is listed as appealing to Asian-Americans, with the note: “No information regarding political affiliation.”
    All featured sources

  • HHS changes may drive hospitalization reporting challenges

    This past week, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) opened up a new area of data reporting for hospitals around the country. In addition to their numbers of COVID-19 patients and supply needs, hospitals are now asked to report their numbers of influenza patients, including flu patients in the ICU and those diagnosed with both flu and COVID-19.

    The new reporting fields were announced in an HHS directive on October 6. They became “available for optional reporting” this past Monday, October 19; but HHS intends to make the flu data fields mandatory in the coming weeks. The move makes sense, broadly speaking—as public health experts worry about double flu and COVID-19 outbreaks putting incredible pressure on hospital systems, collecting data on both diseases at once can help the federal public health agencies quickly identify and get aid to the hospitals which are struggling.

    However, it seems likely that the new fields have caused both blips in HHS data and challenges for the state public health departments which rely upon HHS for their own hospitalization figures. As the COVID Tracking Project (and this newsletter) reported over the summer, any new reporting requirement is likely to strain hospitals which are understaffed or underprepared with their in-house data systems. Such challenges at the hospital level can cause delays and inaccuracies in the data reported at both state and federal levels.

    This week, the COVID Tracking Project’s weekly update called attention to gaps in COVID-19 hospitalization data reported by states. Missouri’s public health department specifically linked their hospitalization underreporting to “data changes from the US Department of Health and Human Services.” Five other states—Kansas, Wisconsin, Georgia, Alabama, and Florida—also reported significant decreases or partial updates to their hospitalization figures. These states didn’t specify reasons for their hospitalization data issues, but based on what I saw over the summer, I believe it is a reasonable hypothesis to connect them with HHS’s changing requirements.

    Jim Salter of the Associated Press built on the COVID Tracking Project’s observations by interviewing state public health department officials. He reported that, in Missouri, some hospitals lost access to HHS’s TeleTracking data portal:

    Missouri Hospital Association Senior Vice President Mary Becker said HHS recently implemented changes; some measures were removed from the portal, others were added or renamed. Some reporting hospitals were able to report using the new measures, but others were not, and as a result, the system crashed, she said.

    “This change is impacting hospitals across the country,” Becker said in an email. “Some states collect the data directly and may not yet be introducing the new measures to their processes. Missouri hospitals use TeleTracking and did not have control over the introduction of the changes to the template.”

    As the nation sets COVID-19 records and cases spike in the Midwest, the last thing that public health officials should be worrying about right now is inaccurate hospitalization data. And yet, here we are.

    more hospitalization data

  • CDC’s failure to resist political takeover

    This past week, two outlets published major investigations of the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC). The first story, by Science’s Charles Piller, focuses on White House Coronavirus Task Force Coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx and her role in the hospitalization data switch from the CDC to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The second story, by ProPublica’s James Bandler, Patricia Callahan, Sebastian Rotella, and Kristen Berg, provides a broader view of internal CDC dynamics and challenges since the start of the pandemic.

    These stories do not focus on data specifically, but I wanted to foreground them this week as crucial insights into how the work of science and public health experts is endangered when powerful leaders prioritize their own narratives. Both stories describe how Dr. Birx disrespected and overrode CDC experts. She wanted data from every hospital in the country, every day, and failed to understand why the CDC could not deliver. The ProPublica story quotes an anonymous CDC scientist:

    Birx expected “every hospital to report every piece of data every day, which is in complete defiance of statistics,” a CDC data scientist said. “We have 60% [of hospitals] reporting, which was certainly good enough for us to have reliable estimates. If we got to 80%, even better. A hundred percent is unnecessary, unrealistic, but that’s part of Birx’s dogma.”

    As I explained in this newsletter’s very first issue, in July, the CDC’s hospital data reporting system was undercut in favor of a new system, built by the software company TeleTracking and managed by the HHS. Hospitals were told to stop reporting to the CDC’s system and start using TeleTracking instead. The two features published this week tie that data switch inexorably to Dr. Birx’s frustration with the CDC and her demand for more frequent data at any cost.

    Public health experts across the country worried that already-overworked hospital staff would face significant challenges in switching to a new data system, from navigating bureaucracy to, in some cases, manually entering numbers into a form with 91 categories. Initial data reported by the new HHS system in July were fraught with errors—such as a report of 118% hospital beds occupied in Rhode Island—and inconsistencies when compared to the hospital data reported out by state public health departments. I co-wrote an analysis of these issues for the COVID Tracking Project.

    But at least, I thought at the time, the HHS system was getting more complete data. The HHS system quickly increased the number of hospitals reporting to the federal government by about 1,500, and by October 6, Dr. Birx bragged at a press briefing that 98% of hospitals were reporting at least weekly. As Piller’s story in Science describes, however, such claims fail to mention that the bar for a hospital to be included in that 98% is very low:

    At a 6 October press briefing, Birx said 98% of hospitals were reporting at least weekly and 86% daily. In its reply to Science, HHS pegged the daily number at 95%. To achieve that, the bar for “compliance” was set very low, as a single data item during the prior week. A 23 September CDC report, obtained by Science, shows that as of that date only about 24% of hospitals reported all requested data, including protective equipment supplies in hand. In five states or territories, not a single hospital provided complete data.

    Piller goes on to describe how HHS’s TeleTracking data system allows errors—such as typos entered by overworked hospital staff—to “flow into [the] system” and then (theoretically) be fixed later. This method further makes HHS’s data untrustworthy for the public health researchers using it to track the pandemic. The agency is working on improvements, certainly, and public callouts of the hospital capacity numbers have slowed since TeleTracking’s rollout in July. Still, the initial political media storm created by this hospitalization data switch, combined with the details about the switch revealed by these two new features, has led me to be much warier of future data releases by both the HHS and the CDC than I was before 2020.

    Just as the White House boasted, “Our staffers get tested every day,” in response to critiques of President Trump’s flaunting of public health measures, the head of the White House Coronavirus Task Force wanted to boast, “We collect data every day,” in response to critiques of the country’s overburdened healthcare system. But testing and collecting data should both be only small parts of the national response to COVID-19. When scientists see their expertise ignored in favor of recommendations that will fit a chosen political narrative, public trust is lost in the very institutions they represent. And rebuilding that trust will take a long time.

    more hospitalization data

  • No, hospitalization data isn’t switching back to the CDC

    I mean, it is. But not right now. Or is it?

    Last Thursday, the Wall Street Journal published an article headlined, “Troubled COVID-19 Data System Returning to CDC.” At first glance, the article reports that the tracking of COVID-19 hospitalization data is returning to the CDC’s charge after numerous concerns were raised about data accuracy and integrity under Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) control.

    Readers, I cannot lie: when I first saw this headline, I lay down on the floor of my apartment and cursed for several minutes. Why would they change it back, I thought. The HHS is already collecting data from more hospitals than the CDC did. It made sense with remdisivir distribution. Why make everyone go through another system switch.

    And then I got up, sent some incredulous messages in the COVID Tracking Project Slack server, and actually read the full article. What is actually happening, according to WSJ reporter Robbie Whelam, is this: the CDC is developing a new data system which will be more efficient for both hospitals and data users. After the new system is complete, the CDC will once again collect and report hospitalization data.

    “CDC is working with us right now to build a revolutionary new data system so it can be moved back to the CDC, and they can have that regular accountability with hospitals relevant to treatment and PPE,” Dr. Birx said, referring to personal protective equipment used by doctors and nurses.

    The article, however, fails to report any meaningful details about this new CDC data system. What is the proposed timeline for the system? What makes it “revolutionary?” Who is developing it? What new metrics will it collect? How will it address challenges that hospitals with fewer staff or lower technological capacity currently face in making daily reports? I could go on, but you get the idea.

    Also, there’s this insight, from POLITICO reporter Dan Diamond:

    Within a few hours, the WSJ had changed their headline to “COVID-19 Data Will Once Again Be Collected by CDC, in Policy Reversal.”

    It continues to be unclear when or how the HHS-back-to-CDC hospitalization data switch will occur, if it does occur. As COVID-19 Tracking Project lead Erin Kissane points out, federal IT development happens very slowly. It will likely be months before definitive information is available on the CDC’s new database.

    Meanwhile, the HHS is proceeding with its own new data system effort: an overhaul called the Modernizing Public Health Reporting and Surveillance project, POLITICO reported this past Wednesday. The project plans to improve data technology and data quality at state and local public health departments over the next several years. It’s an ambitious initiative, considering that HHS is still working on fixing its hospital reporting:

    HHS says that 85 percent of the nation’s hospitals report daily — a mark that is improving, and that includes more metrics the government uses to allocate scarce resources during the pandemic, like the drug remdesivir. But federal officials say they receive only half of the required clinical information on average, a gap that could distort the scope of the pandemic and obscure who’s getting sick where.

    I may be optimistic, but I’m hoping that at least one of these new data systems will be ready to go before the next pandemic hits.

    more hospitalization data
  • HHS hospitalization data: more questions arise

    HHS hospitalization data: more questions arise

    Last Tuesday, the post on COVID-19 hospitalization data that I cowrote with Rebecca Glassman was published on the COVID Tracking Project’s blog. We pointed out significant discrepancies between the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)’s counts of currently hospitalized COVID-19 patients and counts from state public health departments. You can read the full post here, or check out the cliff notes in this thread:

    That same day, the Wall Street Journal published an article on HHS’s estimates of hospital capacity in every state—which, as you may recall from my first newsletter issue, have been plagued with delays and errors. These hospital capacity estimates are based on the raw counts that Rebecca and I analyzed. It appears that errors in hospital reprots are causing errors in HHS’s raw data, which in turn makes it more difficult for HHS analysts to estimate the burden COVID-19 is currently placing on healthcare systems. When the CDC ran this dataset, estimates were updated multiple times a week; now, under the HHS, they are only updated once a week.

    On Wednesday, the New York Times reported that 34 current and former members of a federal health advisory committee had sent a letter opposing the move of hospital data from the CDC to the HHS. These medical and public health experts cited new burdens for hospitals and transparency concerns as issues for HHS’s new data collection system. (The New York Times article references Rebecca’s and my blog post, which is pretty cool.)

    In an earlier issue, I reported that several congressmembers had opened an investigation into TeleTracking, the company HHS contracted to build its new data collection system. Well, the New York Times reported on Friday that TeleTracking is refusing to answer congressmembers’ questions because the company signed a nondisclosure agreement.

    And finally, HHS chief information officer José Arrieta resigned on Friday. I’m tempted to hop on the next bus to Pittsburgh and start banging on the door of TeleTracking’s headquarters if we don’t get answers soon.

    more hospitalization data

  • HHS hospitalization data: still questionable

    I’m starting to think I should make HHS hospitalization data a weekly section of this newsletter.

    In case you haven’t read my previous two issues, here’s the situation: in mid-July, hospitals stopped reporting their counts of COVID-19 patients to the CDC, and instead began reporting to the HHS. Since then, HHS’s national hospitalization dataset has been unreliable. HHS’s counts of currently hospitalized COVID-19 patients are far higher than the concurrent counts reported by state public health departments, and HHS’s numbers often rise and fall significantly from day to day without clear explanation.

    I, along with other COVID Tracking Project (CTP) volunteers, have been monitoring both hospitalization counts daily—the two counts being, HHS’s numbers and state-reported numbers compiled by CTP. Rebecca Glassman (data entry volunteer and resident Florida expert) and I have drafted a blog post for CTP about the biggest discrepancies we’ve seen, which will be published in the next few days.

    Here’s a little preview of the issues we’re calling out:

    • In six states, HHS’s counts of currently hospitalized COVID-19 patients are, on average, at least 150% higher than the state’s counts. These states include Maine, Arkansas, New York, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Delaware.
    • Both Florida and Nevada saw unexplained spikes in their HHS counts which were not matched by corresponding spikes in state counts.
    • The state of Louisiana actually reports more currently hospitalized COVID-19 patients than HHS does, even though the definitions used by both sources suggest that this discrepancy should be the other way around.
    • Many states do not have publicly available or easy-to-find definitions for how currently hospitalized COVID-19 patients are classified.
    • HHS’s counts on August 6 were very low across the board, with significant drops in the number of hospitals reporting in every state.

    If you are a local reporter in any of the states mentioned here and would like to investigate the discrepancies in your area, please reach out to me! I’m happy to share the data underlying this analysis.

    more hospitalization data

  • No, we’re not done talking about HHS hospitalization data

    The HHS is still collecting and publishing COVID-19 hospitalization data, and I, personally, feel as though I know both more and less than I did when I wrote last week’s newsletter. This week’s issue is already rather long, so here, I will focus on outlining the main questions I have right now.

    Why are HHS’s COVID-19 hospitalization numbers higher than states’? While HHS’s most public-facing dataset is the HHS Protect hospital utilization dataset, last updated on July 23, the department also reports daily counts of the hospital beds occupied in every state. This dataset includes counts of all currently hospitalized patients with confirmed and suspected COVID-19. Local public health departments in all 50 states and D.C. also report the same datapoint; the COVID Tracking Project collects, standardizes, and reports these local counts daily.

    According to analysis by the COVID Tracking Project, over the week of July 20 to July 26, HHS reported an average of 24% more hospitalized COVID-19 patients across the U.S. than the states did. Figures for some states show even more variation. In Florida, for example, HHS’s count nearly doubled from July 26 to July 27 (from about 11,000 patients to about 21,500 patients). The state reported about 9,000 hospitalized COVID-19 patients both days.

    https://twitter.com/NotoriousRSG/status/1288513607316250626

    In Arkansas, meanwhile, the state has reported about 500 hospitalizations each day for the past week, while HHS has reported about 1,600. Overall, for 28 out of 53 states and territories, there is at least one day in the past week when HHS’s count of currently hospitalized COVID-19 patients is at least 50% higher than the state public health department’s count.

    The COVID Tracking Project suggests several potential reasons for this discrepancy. Some hospitals may report to HHS, but not to their state public health departments, either because they are federally-run hospitals (such as hospitals run by the Veteran’s Association) or because HHS’s tie to federal supplies such as remsidivir provides a greater incentive for complete reporting. State definitions for who counts as a COVID-19 patient differ from place to place, and may be narrower than the federal categorization, which includes all confirmed and suspected cases. And some hospitals might also be inputting data entry errors or double-counting their patient numbers as they adjust to the new reporting system. As I noted in last week’s issue, we do not know how HHS is screening for and removing data entry errors in their dataset.

    How did the CDC-to-HHS switch impact local public health departments? The COVID Tracking Project’s blog post on hospitalization data also explains that several states had delays or errors in reporting current hospitalization numbers because the states previously relied on the CDC’s database for these values. Public health departments in Idaho, Missouri, South Carolina, Wyoming, Texas, and California have all documented issues with compiling hospitalization data at the state level thanks to the CDC-to-HHS system change. Similar issues may be going unreported in other states.

    As I described last week, changing database systems in the middle of a pandemic can be particularly challenging for already-overburdened hospitals. It can take multiple hours a day to enter data into both HHS and state reporting systems, and that’s on top of the technological and bureaucratic hurdles that hospitals must clear. Public health departments are scrambling to help their hospitals, as hospitals are scrambling to report the correct data—to say nothing of actually taking care of their patients.

    Why should I trust a database built by a tech company that got the job through suspicious means? According to an investigation by NPR, TeleTracking Technologies received its federal contract to build HHS’s data system for collecting hospital data under some unusual circumstances. For one thing, HHS claimed that TeleTracking’s contract was won through competitive bidding, but none of 20 competitors contacted by NPR knew about this opportunity. For another, the process HHS used to award that contract is typically used for scientific research and new technology, not database building. And finally, Michal Zamagias, TeleTracking’s CEO, is a real estate investor and long-time Republican donor with ties to the Trump Organization.

    Rep. Clyburn—you know, that chair of the congressional coronavirus subcommittee—has launched an investigation into TeleTracking and its CEO. Other Congressmembers are asking questions, too. I, for one, am excited to see what they find.

    more hospitalization data
  • Hospital capacity dataset gets a makeover

    Hospital capacity dataset gets a makeover

    Screenshot retrieved from the HHS Protect Public Data Hub on July 26, 2020.

    On July 14, the White House announced that hospitals across America would no longer report their COVID-19 patient numbers and supply needs to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Instead, they would report numbers through a data portal set up in April by the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS). A July 10 guidance issued by HHS requests that hospitals send reports on how many overall patients they have, how many COVID-19 patients they have, the status of those patients, and their needs for crucial supplies such as PPE and remdesivir.

    In some ways, this switch actually makes sense: HHS’ data portal, built by a contractor called TeleTracking, is designed specifically to support more efficient data collection during COVID-19. HHS was already collecting hospitalization data second-hand through state reports, some hospital-to-HHS reports, and the CDC’s old system, called the National Healthcare Safety Network; the new system is more streamlined at the federal level. HHS is also the primary federal entity collecting data on COVID-19 lab test results, through reports that go directly from laboratories to HHS (often bypassing local and state public health departments).

    Simplifying data collection to one office—just HHS, rather than HHS and CDC—should theoretically make it easier for hospitals to report their needs and receive aid from the federal governmentquickly. But switching systems during the middle of a pandemic is dangerous. Switching systems during a COVID-19 surge in the Sun Belt when hospitals are being pushed to their full capacity is especially dangerous. Hospital databases, once set up to report to the CDC, must be reconfigured—or worse, exhausted healthcare workers must manually enter their numbers into the new system.

    STAT News’ Nicholas Florko and Eric Boodman explore this issue in more detail, but here is one quote from John Auerbach, president and CEO of Trust for America’s Health, which summarizes the problem:

    Hospitals are incredibly varied across the country in terms of their capacity to report data in a timely and accurate way. If you’re going to say every hospital, regardless of its size, its resources, its capacity, has to learn a new system quickly, it’s problematic.

    It is inevitable that, for the first few weeks of this new system, any hospital capacity data reported by HHS will be rife with errors. And yet, public health leaders, researchers, and people simply living in Texas and Florida need to know how their hospitals are doing right now, so HHS has published the results of their new reporting system only a week after the ownership shift. The new website HHS built to publish these data, called the HHS Protect Public Data Hub, went live this past Monday, July 20. (Veteran users noted that this page copied the homework of the dataset’s former home on the CDC website—same color scheme and everything.)

    As I send this newsletter, the HHS Protect dataset was most recently updated on Thursday, July 23 with data as of the previous day. Experts looking at these data, including my fellow volunteers at the COVID Tracking Project, quickly noticed that something seemed off:

    You read that right: according to HHS Protect, 118% of Rhode Island’s hospital beds are currently occupied. As are 123% of its intensive care beds. And that’s just an extreme example; when one compares the hospital capacity estimates in this HHS update to the most recent estimates from the CDC’s system (dated July 14), only 6 states do not show changes of at least 20%. New Mexico, for example, has supposedly seen its number of COVID-19 patients skyrocket 265% in eight days’ time.

    Yes, the HHS system is collecting figures from about 1,500 more hospitals than the CDC system did. And yes, 21 states are currently listed as having “uncontrolled spread” by public health research groupCOVID Exit Strategy. But hospitalization figures typically rise slowly, with a slight delay from cases; for journalists like myself who have been looking at this data point for months, the jump reported by HHS is simply not reasonable.

    It’s good news for journalists and public health leaders that hospital capacity data is once again publicly available from a standardized, federal source. But I have a lot of questions for HHS. What is the agency doing to support already-taxed hospitals that do not have the staff or resources to transfer their database systems? When hospitals inevitably submit their data with errors, what protocols are in place to catch these issues and ensure all data going out to the public portal is accurate? How will the new system support state public health departments, such as Missouri and South Carolina, that previously relied on the CDC for their hospitalization figures? Will HHS make other datasets available on the HHS Protect portal (such as lab data), and if so, when?

    A fellow volunteer from the COVID Tracking Project and I are drafting a strongly worded email to HHS’s press team including these questions and many more; I hope to have some answers for you by next week. In the meantime, you can read Stacker’s story on hospital capacity by state, which does not cite the new HHS figures. Don’t ask me how many times I had to update the story’s methodology.

    more hospitalization data