The nation’s decentralized, underfunded reporting system hampers efforts to combat the coronavirus.

“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.

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data on vaccinations, infections, hospitalizations and deaths is scattered among local health departments, is often out of date and hard to aggregate at the national level, and it is simply inadequate for the job of battling a highly transmissible and stealthy pathogen.”

“We are flying blind,” said Ali Mokdad, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation who spent two decades working for the CDC. “With all our money, with all our know-how, we have dropped the ball. … We don’t have the data. We don’t have the good surveillance system to keep us informed.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/09/30/inadequate-us-data-pandemic-response/