A growing number of public health officials working at the state level are worried that the federal government isn't collecting enough accurate data about "Breakthrough" infections, yet the Biden Administration has pushed ahead with plans to dole out booster shots, as well as other COVID policies.
More than a dozen have told Politico that they do not have the capacity to match hospital admission data with patients' immunization records, forcing states to rely on hospital administrators to report breakthrough infections.
The resulting data is often aggregated, inaccurate and omits critical details for teasing out trends, such as which vaccine a person received and whether they have been fully vaccinated, a dozen state officials said.
Perhaps the biggest obstacle to collecting data on breakthrough infections is the balkanized nature of state health-care systems.
To complement data on hospitalized cases from the 50-state reporting network, the CDC is conducting a smaller study with a subset of states to examine all of their breakthrough infections, including mild cases that don't send people to the hospital.
"We report what we have, but we know that it's limited because it's based on a direct report from a provider - as opposed to taking a data set of all hospitalizations and matching that against our vaccine registry," said Sokol, the Louisiana epidemiologist.
To be sure, deliberately under-counting breakthrough infections has its advantages: for example, the Biden Administration can mask the number of breakthrough infections reported, making the vaccines appear more effective than they actually are.
Wednesday, August 25, 2021
"We Don't Understand What's Really Happening" - The CDC Is Under-Counting 'Breakthrough' COVID Cases
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