White House senior adviser Jared Kushner’s task force wants to develop a national coronavirus surveillance system to track in real-time where and how patients are being treated for the disease, Politico reports.
The proposed database would help identify regions in the country that could safely lift stay-at-home orders, and which parts should keep them in place. However, some critics think the program be a massive use of government power to breach patient data privacy.
“This is a genuine crisis — we have to work through it and do our best to protect people’s health,” Jessica Rich, a former director of the Federal Trade Commission’s consumer protection bureau, told Politico. “But doing that doesn’t mean we have to destroy privacy.”
The program would allow the federal government to use privately collected data to track specific data on individual hospitals, such as how many beds and how many patients have been treated.
The creation of a national coronavirus database could help the nation get out in front of the fast-spreading virus, which officials anticipate will strain the health care systems of nearly every major city over the next few months and threaten to reoccur in pockets of the nation for some time after that.
Supporters of the database think it could help health care workers get ahead of coronavirus before it spirals out of control.
“It allows you to be much more targeted and precise in how you engage,” an unnamed person who sat in on the discussions told Politico. “They need data to make the policy decisions, and so that’s what we and others now have been asked to do.”
Avi Berkowitz, who serves as assistant to the president and special representative for international negotiations, told Politico there are no plans to institute surveillance of COVID-19 patients.
"This story makes no sense and is completely false," Berkowitz said. "The White House gets many unsolicited random proposals on a variety of topics, but Jared has no knowledge of this proposal or the people mentioned in this article who may have submitted it."
In Monday's coronavirus briefing, the president said he was not aware of the effort but that it "sounded like a good idea."
“I have never heard about it,” President Donald Trump said. “It sounds very scientific, and it sounds like it could be very good based on tracking, but it also has to do with rights and lots of different constitutional questions.”
When a reporter brought up the possibility of a coronavirus tracking database being misused like the FISA courts have been, Trump responded: “FISA abuse, in which I was the one abused.”
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