CDC COVID-19 Database Retired

On July 10, 2020, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued a memo directing hospitals to reporting COVID-19 patient information to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Hospitals had previously been required to submit patient information through the CDC's National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN) COVID-19 reporting system. However, HHS indicated that the NHSN system was being retired, and would be replaced with a centralized database maintained by HHS (rather than the CDC).

Experts have expressed concern that the change in reporting requirements will negative impact data integrity and availability. On July 31, 2020, thirty-four current and former members the Healthcare Infection Control Practices Advisory Committee (HICPAC) issued an "opinion" in which they said they "are extremely concerned about th[e] abrupt change in COVID-19 reporting. Retiring NHSN’s COVID-19 surveillance system will have serious consequences on data integrity." The opinion stated: "hospitals are now scrambling to determine how to meet daily reporting requirements to []HHS . . . As each hospital (or state) re-creates its COVID-19 reporting structure, the data’s precision is at risk. Moving forward, it will be even more challenging to perform meaningful inter-state comparisons, and to understand which COVID-19 mitigation strategies were successful (or failed)."

Other public health experts have warned that the change in reporting systems could hinder public access to COVID-19 data because HHS' database is not publicly available. 

Update:

On August 20, 2020, HHS announced that hospitals would again be required to report COVID-19 data to the CDC.