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COVID-19 DATA: Messy, incomplete U.S. data hobbles pandemic response

The contentious and confusing debate in recent weeks over coronavirus booster shots has exposed a fundamental weakness in the United States’ ability to respond to a public health crisis: The data is a mess.

THE BIGGER QUESTIONS: How many people have been infected at this point? No one knows for sure, in part because of insufficient testing and incomplete reporting. How many fully vaccinated people have had breakthrough infections? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention decided to track only a fraction of them. When do inoculated people need booster shots? American officials trying to answer that have had to rely heavily on data from abroad.

CRITICAL: important data on vaccinations, infections, hospitalizations and deaths are scattered among local health departments, is often out of date and hard to aggregate at the national level, and it is simply inadequate for the job of battling a highly transmissible and stealthy pathogen.

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