For more than a year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been collecting data on hospitalizations for Covid-19 in the United States and broken down by age, race and vaccination status. But it hasn’t made most of the information public.
Two weeks ago, when the CDC released the first significant data on the effectiveness of boosters in adults under the age of 65, it omitted the numbers for much of that population: 18- to 49-year-olds, the group the data showed was have the least chance of additional injections, as they were already well protected after the first two doses.
The agency recently introduced a wastewater data dashboard on its website that will be updated daily and may provide early signals of an impending wave of Covid cases. Some states and localities had shared wastewater information with the agency since the pandemic began, but it had never released those findings before.
Two full years after the pandemic, the agency leading the country’s response to the public health emergency has published only a small portion of the data it has collected, several people familiar with the data said.
Much of the withheld information could help state and local health officials better target their efforts to control the virus. Detailed, current data on hospital admissions by age and race would help health officials identify and assist the population at highest risk. Information on hospital admissions and deaths by age and vaccination status would have helped inform whether healthy adults needed booster shots. And wastewater surveillance across the country would spot outbreaks and emerging variants early.
Without the booster data for 18- to 49-year-olds, the outside experts that federal health authorities turn to for advice had to rely on numbers from Israel to make their recommendations about the injections.
Kristen Nordlund, a spokeswoman for the CDC, said the agency has been slow in releasing the various data streams “because it’s not finally ready for prime time.” She said the agency’s “priority in collecting data is to ensure it is accurate and usable.”
Another reason is the fear that the information could be misinterpreted, Ms Nordlund said.
dr. Daniel Jernigan, deputy director of the agency for public health science and surveillance, said the pandemic has exposed the fact that data systems at the CDC and at the state level are outdated and unsuitable for processing large amounts of data. CDC scientists are trying to modernize the systems, he said.
