Epidemiologists from several University of California campuses and Standford University since April have been seeking detailed COVID-19 case and contact-tracing data from the county and state health authorities for research. With this data, scientists hope to uncover more effective approaches to curb the spread of the coronavirus.
Rajiv Bhatia, Rajiv Bhatia, a physician and epidemiologist who teaches at Stanford, says, "it's a basic mantra of epidemiology and public health" to follow the data in order to understand the wheres and hows of the disease's spread. However, agencies have been denying requests for data access from April through June, according to a ScienceMag report.
Health authorities have cited several reasons for the refusal, including workload constraints and privacy concerns, in spite of the fact that records can be deidentified. Bhatia believes this has led to a delay in the progress of coronavirus research.
"In 4 months of the epidemic, collecting millions of records, no one in California or at the CDC [U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] has done the basic epidemiology, Bhatia said."
Scientists are also concerned why some states refuse to share highly specific information about their COVID-19 cases, which could, according to them, could hamper efforts to identifying targeted measures that could control the spread of SARS-CoV-2 without having to implement full-scale lockdowns.
Now, epidemiologists across the country are disturbed over the news reports claiming states are providing the same data they want to Palantir Technologies, which is a federal contractor and a company that has drawn flak for data work supporting Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportations. This has sparked widespread concern among epidemiologists and public health experts, especially since the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has ordered hospitals to provide info on COVID-19 cases and patient information to the Palantir system-largely via a second contractor, TeleTracking Technologies-rather than to CDC as they have for decades.
Due to the lack of data from public authorities, clinics are now resorting to relying on their own research. Scientists are now doing the best that they can in order to pinpoint the scale of the virus' spread and how to put a halt to it.
But it goes without saying that the absence of neighborhood-level intelligence for public health outreach will result in "a one-size-fits-all solution that might exacerbate the problem." Scientists agree that regular reassessment of granular data on cases is vital, and if the information is withheld, COVID-19 will cause more deaths.
