Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/07/17/trump-admin-orders-hospitals-t.html
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The information will go direct to Jared Kushner. He’ll sort it all out. /s
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Ya know, there is NO reason the data cannot be sent to both places simultaneously. The idea that by sending it all to DC will ‘streamline’ the process is therefore, bullshit. What then could the reason be?
The same stable genius who thinks testing causes the number of cases to go up believes if he can convince people there is no problem, then he will be re-elected. My god, he is such a narcissistic simpleton! He will squash bad numbers and then, presto! he thinks he’s got another 4 years in office.
Buttery Males!
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That’s what I thought. Or a friend of his who knows how to use Excel.
ETA: Swamp field guide: Company it’s going to is run by Michael Zamagias a Real Estate executive. He’s a business person! He’s going to run the data thingie like a Business Person! He’s likely one of those best people we hear so much about. You can tell he’s competent as he was provided a no-bid contract.
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If I understand this properly, we can still get access to cases and deaths (Worldometer stuff) but things that really matter, like hospitalizations and ICU closures, will become privileged information and only available as filtered through the administration. Yeah, a power grab of epic proportions.
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I know this sounds naive, but aren’t most hospitals privately owned, can’t they send the data to who ever they want and/or share it with whoever they want? I know they have to send the data to the government initially…but after that, they can share it with their state or with WHO, right?
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I give this until the end of the week [1] before hospitals, etc. start alternate reporting channels. The Administration is not exactly regarded with reverence there.
Actually, I was going to call $DAUGHTER today (it’s her birthday) and health stats for her State happens to be her job. I’ll have to ask.
[1] Why, yes – it is Friday, isn’t it?
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I see two ways it plays out.
trump meddles with the data in order to make everything look rosy. Actually this is harder because it involves documentable tampering.
trump hides all data and makes himself the sole source for information to the public: “all is well, numbers are dropping, open up, back to school…”. This is easier to do, and the lying is less specific, and of course trump puts himself at center stage.
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This alone should be grounds to keep the 
border closed.
If we can’t assess what’s going on then we must assume it is the worst case scenario.
Fun fact: driving in Canada with U.S. licence plates is already drawing a negative reaction.
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Oops Thom Dunn wrote about this already I duped his post! Anyway it’s horrible and Putin is pleased.
Thom’s is here from a day ago.
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Can states collect this data as well? Time to say “fuck you” to the federal government and listen to your (Democratic) governors?
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Just called my Representative and both my Senators. Not letting this one pass.
Wish I knew who to call about the mystery troops snatching protesters in Portland. 
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Is there anything that prevents them from manipulating numbers of cases and deaths?
It depends what you mean by prevents. There are some laws about altering reports and falsifying data, but law hasn’t exactly been a major constraint on this administration’s behavior and where those laws exist they tend to be narrow. There are some practical limits with the difficulty of manipulating large data sets in a somewhat believable manner, but hiding the underlying data gets around most of those. There are no practical barriers if they want to boldly lie and we’ve given up enforcing the law for this administration.
Yes and some do including some local governments, but the utility of the data drops as you get to smaller and smaller jurisdictions. One of the benefits of national data, with smaller areas broken out, is that it covers things across boundaries. The governor of Illinois needs to know if Saint Louis is almost out of beds.
The responsible ones will, but some won’t either out of political desires or just to keep it as proprietary business info.
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While part of this is about controling the data on hospital capacity to allow trump to lie about the state of the pandemic before the election, the biggest part seems to me to be the same swampy grift this admin does for everything. Enough of the data needed for policy decisions will make it to the CDC and local officials.
The primary goal of this seems to be giving massive amounts of medical data to Palantir and the 8 private companies involved in collection and analysis, because in all things, this admin thinks their first priority is twisting government to the financial benefit of their donors
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There are some pretty strong reasons why things like capacity availability etc. are already shared around. For instance (first person) if you call in a serious EMS case, part of what the dispatcher does is find out which hospitals are able to accept the patient. That’s real time, real lives, and “business proprietary” just means your hospital doesn’t get patients delivered.
Mortality, obviously, is already collected at both local and State level. Unless you’re waiting for a full up postmortem (yes, it’s happened; no, they’re not bothering with ICU cases lately if they have test results already and certainly not right now while they don’t even have time for living patients much less dead ones) the presumptive cause of death goes in PDQ.
Also happening in the UK, which - oddly - has an equally criminally incompetent pandemic strategy.
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There are different levels of sharing. They may choose to just share with EMS, other local hospitals and other groups that are needed for their functioning, but not choose to make the data widely available publicly or to researchers. I can easily imagine someone in the release chain for a hospital choosing not to let the data get a wide release so they don’t spook potential elective surgery patients.
Once EMS has it, it’s not secret any more.
