Public health officials in Houston are struggling to keep up with one of the nation's largest coronavirus outbreaks. They are desperate to trace cases and quarantine patients before they spread the virus to others. But first, they must negotiate with the office fax machine. From a report: The machine at the Harris County Public Health department in Houston recently became overwhelmed when one laboratory sent a large batch of test results, spraying hundreds of pages all over the floor. "Picture the image of hundreds of faxes coming through, and the machine just shooting out paper," said Dr. Umair Shah, executive director of the department. The county has so far recorded more than 40,000 coronavirus cases. Some doctors fax coronavirus tests to Dr. Shah's personal number, too. Those papers are put in an envelope marked "confidential" and walked to the epidemiology department. As hard as the United States works to control coronavirus, it keeps running into problems caused by its fragmented health system, a jumble of old and new technology, and data standards that don't meet epidemiologists' needs. Public health officials and private laboratories have managed to expand testing to more than half a million performed daily, but they do not have a system that can smoothly handle that avalanche of results.

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情報元へのリンク