US government's data-collecting system outdated, pandemic data messy: newspaper

LOS ANGELES -- The US government's data-collecting system is outdated, and the country's data on the pandemic are "messy, unreliable, incomplete and slow," the Los Angeles Times reported on Monday.

"For a year into the pandemic, our nation relied on academic, media and other volunteers to collect and report data on testing and cases, rather than on our nation's public health agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention," the newspaper said in an opinion article.

The country's data on the pandemic "are messy, unreliable, incomplete and slow to be reported," the article said, noting data misadventures had characterized the US pandemic response.

"The speed, scope and scale of the data overwhelmed the government's outdated infrastructure until it finally created new systems for functions such as disease tracking and race and ethnicity reporting," the article said.

Although the US government currently has made significant improvements, data "are still largely locked into the government's outdated legacy tech systems that can't communicate with one another" it said.

"The US still had to rely on international data to make decisions on vaccine boosters, despite administering more vaccine doses domestically, because we couldn't link and analyze our own data," it added.