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Bloomberg
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention uses outdated tools to track and analyse how Covid-19 spreads on planes, hindering the agency’s ability to stop outbreaks, a government watchdog agency said.
Air travel is a constant concern in public health, since a sick person can board a plane in one country and hours later land in another, quickly spreading disease over large distances. Because of that, the CDC’s contact-tracing capabilities have long been seen as critical to the agency’s disease surveillance and response.
But in a report, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said the agency’s technological tools were old, slow and prone to problems. The “CDC is not positioned to efficiently analyse and disseminate data to inform public health policies and respond to disease threats,†the GAO said.
The report comes as the CDC prepares to share findings from an internal review of response to the Covid-19 pandemic that has resulted in more than 1 million American deaths. Officials inside the CDC and from other parts of the government who work with the agency have raised longstanding frustrations with how the health agency collects and manages data, Bloomberg reported.
When tracking air travellers, many data entry tasks are done manually, and it can take the CDC as long as two weeks to collect additional information to address errors or gaps in data provided by airlines, according to the GAO.