🏥 U.S. govt should release the data on hospital-acquired SARS-CoV-2 cases 📊
Please join me in writing President Biden to demand this crucial information about hospitals that is "being kept private" right now.
Please join me in demanding this crucial information about hospitals that is "being kept private" right now. If you don’t want to use the form, you may submit this letter or your own comment, directly at the White House Contact form: https://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/
Thanks,
- Chloe
Dear President Joe Biden
Please require data on hospital acquired SARS-CoV-2 infections be made available to the public. Hospitals are required to collect data on SARS-CoV-2 cases acquired while patients are in the hospital (nosocomial infections) and report the data to the Department of Health and Human Services, but this information is not available to the public. Similar data on other non-SARs-CoV-2 infections has been publicly available for years; this information should be too.
In this ongoing pandemic, the responsibility to prevent the spread of SARS-CoV-2 is on individual people who are being asked to make personal risk-assessments about their and their community’s health. Without this data on SARS-CoV-2 nosocomial infection people do not have complete information. This lack of transparency makes it impossible to make fully informed decisions about healthcare risks, prevents people from pursuing medical care, and damages hospitals’ reputations by appearing to want to hide this data.
Many thousands of Americans and their loved ones have been infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus while in healthcare settings. Some of us have lost those loved ones. Nosocomial SARS-CoV-2 infection is not inevitable and should not be viewed as such. People expect to be protected from acquiring a potentially serious disease when in the already vulnerable position of needing medical care. People have a right to know what to expect from their healthcare providers.
Release the data.
References:
Politico: Biden officials to keep private the names of hospitals where patients contracted Covid
“Not knowing what the likelihood of getting transmission in the hospital really impacts an individual’s ability to quote unquote ‘make a personal decision’ on their risk levels,” said Mia Ives-Rublee, a disability rights advocate who has a lung condition that makes her more susceptible to Covid.
“A majority of voters want HHS to level with us – tell us how much coronavirus is spreading in the particular hospital we go to,” said Matthew Cortland, an immunocompromised disability rights activist who ran a recent poll on the issue for Data for Progress, a left-leaning think tank.
Data for Progress conducted a survey of 1,335 likely voters nationally using web panel
respondents. 66% think HHS should report data on "hospital-onset" coronavirus cases for individual hospitals in addition to the total number of hospital cases in the U.S.
WebMd : What is a Nosocomial Infection?
A nosocomial infection is an infection you get while you’re in the hospital for another reason. It's also called a hospital-acquired infection or a health-care associated infection.Patients and healthcare professionals bring germs inside hospitals and pass them to each other. Sometimes, people carry these germs without feeling sick, which means they spread them to others without knowing. If you’re already in the hospital for surgery or another illness, your immune system might be too weak to fight off these germs.
