When Congress required the centers to establish a modernized system in 2006, it gave them a 2008 deadline. Yet 12 years on, the CDC still has not stitched together more than 100 reporting systems into a cohesive dashboard. This is blowing our country’s budget, and those of many states.

Compounding the problem is the fact that CDC reporting is usually a one-way street: health care workers report to public health officials, but get little information back. The result: clinical knowledge, patient data and best practices for treating COVID-19 aren’t being shared in real time for hospitals and policymakers to use. That is costing lives, as well as trillions of dollars.

To succeed where the CDC has failed, the Department of Health and Human Services must do four things.

First, it must identify, prioritize, and standardize the key data needed to ensure a robust, informed response to COVID-19, opioid abuse and other public health threats. For example, it is essential to collect timely information on hospitalizations and mortality, the age and comorbidities of patients and total net active cases. It is scandalous that this data is not uniformly defined and reported.

To increase understanding of which populations are most susceptible to the contagion, the data must identify confirmed cases by race, ethnicity, disability, and income levels. it must also be geographically specific, so policymakers can identify hotspots and implement targeted mitigation strategies.