In mid-June, the post-coronavirus reopening of America was in full swing, even as the number of new cases was rising fast. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was key to President Trump’s grand reopening, providing local officials with guidance on how to open up safely. But in private officials admitted the country had failed to track the spread of the deadly virus and that the agency thus lacked the vital information it needed to offer such guidance, Forbes can now reveal.
Disease tracing systems across U.S. states had proven ineffective in furnishing the agency with adequate data on how to curtail the deadly virus, the agency had conceded. The number of people who needed tracking had become simply unmanageable, the CDC said, writing: “Most jurisdictions have been forced to abandon monitoring because the number of monitorees exceeds the capacity. . . . As a result, critical data for CDC to inform and guide public health response to Covid-19 is unavailable.”
The CDC’s admittance of the national failure came in a contract description obtained via FOIA request, from a deal signed off in a bid to fix the problem. The health agency gave Mitre Corp., a much-trusted nonprofit contractor that Forbes recently revealed to be heavily involved in secretive FBI and DHS snooping projects, $16.5 million to build out a different kind of surveillance system, dubbed Sara Alert. The hope was that rather than only work for singular states, it could be a national tool to effectively track Americans exposed to the virus, one that had by then infected 2.5 million in the United States. The Mitre-led project was titled: “Building an Enduring National Capability to Contain Covid-19.”
The confession came a day before President Trump claimed the disease was “dying out,” and a month after he’d unveiled his Opening Up America Again plan. In May, the CDC was offering guidance to states on how to follow that plan, even though it knew it didn’t have the requisite data. Since then, the nationwide reopening has continued apace, despite warnings from the likes of Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, about the risks of opening too soon.
Meanwhile, though they hadn’t openly stated just how ineffective Covid-19 tracing systems had been, CDC officials were stressing why good data on transmission was vital to the country’s response to the pandemic. “I think it’s important that we really have good data at a granular level,” said CDC director Robert Redfield, during a briefing on June 25.
In the same briefing, he noted the agency had handed out $10.2 billion to states “to augment their testing, contact tracing and isolation capability,” whilst bemoaning that “for decades, this nation has underinvested in the core capabilities of public health,” including in data analytics for tracking diseases. CDC has been splashing money on such data analytics tools in its fight against the coronavirus, as Forbes revealed in multiple multimillion-dollar contracts with Palantir, a Silicon Valley giant that has the backing of Trump ally Peter Thiel. But months after signing off on those deals, vital data was still lacking.
President Trump and the CDC are now coming under fire for their push to reopen when they didn’t have adequate information on Covid-19’s spread. Senator Ron Wyden told Forbes it was now clear the health agency was ill-equipped to trace Covid-19 outbreaks, “raising the question of whether the Trump Administration willfully ignored this information while recommending schools and other sectors reopen.”
“As nearly 200,000 Americans have lost their lives, Donald Trump still has no semblance of a national plan to test and trace,” Senator Wyden added.
The CDC hasn’t responded to requests for comment.
Sara to the rescue?
The CDC is now banking on Mitre’s Sara Alert to save the country’s Covid-19 surveillance efforts. Built for free by the nonprofit contractor (one that receives between $1.5 billion and $2 billion every year from Congress), Sara Alert allows public health officials to enroll and monitor individuals and households who are either sick or at risk of being infected. Those who are enrolled are then asked to enter their symptoms daily via text, email, phone or a website. This should help healthcare bodies determine who needs care and who needs to be isolated.
As of July, Sara Alert had only been deployed in a handful of states—including Arkansas, Maine, Pennsylvania and Vermont—and it’s unclear how widely it’s in use today. Nor has any date been set for the national rollout. Mitre had provided neither comment nor updated data at the time of publication.
Those who have put Sara Alert into action have been impressed. They include the Arkansas Department of Health. “This system allows us to more readily identify secondary cases, really establishing a better handle on social clusters, which has been a challenge,” Dr. Mike Cima, chief epidemiologist, told Forbes earlier this year.
Like Dr. Cima, the CDC wants to use Sara Alert in perpetuity for tracking future epidemics. Once refined and scaled out, it will be the de facto national track-and-trace system for diseases, according to the contract description. But before that, a pilot project has to be completed, with an additional five jurisdictions to be added before any national rollout can take place.
Mitre’s been key to various Covid-19 efforts. In March, the DHS Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction office tasked it with developing systems to better support local lawmakers with information on the impact of “non-pharmaceutical” measures like social distancing and mask-wearing. And at the start of this month, HHS Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response handed Mitre a $24.5 million contract for a project entitled: “Strategic Engagement, Education, Outreach and Analytics Support for Covid-19 Convalescent Plasma.” When drawn from those who’ve fought off Covid-19, that plasma contains antibodies that could be transfused to patients who need a boost in fighting the virus. In late August, Trump announced emergency authorization for the use of this plasma to treat infected individuals, in lieu of any vaccine.
The number of infected per day has fallen since peaks of above 70,000 in July, but the figure remains higher in September than in the months leading up to and including June. The Sara Alert should provide better data on just how big a catastrophe Covid-19 has become for the country and how the administration’s response has ameliorated (or exacerbated) the eventual impact.
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HENRY KOTULA 