We Searched for Covid-19 Data. Heres What We Couldnt Find. – The New York Times

The basics are early signals from emergency departments that could warn us if cases are spiking; information about cases, tests and deaths over time by age, sex, and race and ethnicity; and information about outbreaks in nursing homes and elsewhere, as well as epidemiological links among cases.

Indicators that could be published in a few weeks include performance measures for testing, case interviews and contact tracing; health care worker infections; and objective assessment of the proportion of people wearing masks correctly in indoor public spaces such as stores and public transit. (This could be monitored by human surveyors or security cameras for aggregate analysis, while protecting individuals privacy.)

The full list is available here.

The greatest benefit of good information isnt knowledge, its action. Among other things, these indicators would give us:

Information on the size, lethality and status of control of every outbreak, including those in every nursing home, homeless shelter, correctional facility and meatpacking factory.

The opportunity to better understand and reverse the unequal burden the pandemic is placing on Black, Hispanic, Native American and other communities.

Joshua Lederberg, the great microbiologist and Nobel laureate, used to say that microbes outnumber us: Its our intelligence against their numbers. But today, despite a glut of data, we are starved of intelligence. These indicators would start to fix that by enabling people to know what their risk is and how well their community is dealing with the virus, and to let every government know what needs to be done. What gets measured publicly can get managed.

The federal government has some of this information, at least in some form. This should immediately be made public, as hospitalization data has been. Every state and every county should provide this information, and we are encouraged that several states have already told us they will begin doing so. Journalists should ask for it. And the public including educators trying to reopen schools, business owners planning their financial future and parents trying to safeguard their children should demand it.

Tom Frieden (@DrTomFrieden), the director of the C.D.C. from 2009 to 2017, is the president and chief executive of Resolve to Save Lives, part of the global public health organization Vital Strategies. Cyrus Shahpar, a former director of the Global Rapid Response Team at the C.D.C., is the director of the Prevent Epidemics team at Resolve to Save Lives.

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We Searched for Covid-19 Data. Heres What We Couldnt Find. - The New York Times