CDC still not ready to respond quickly to threats posed by international travel, US audit finds


The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s reliance on outdated systems to collect and analyze data on international air travelers continues to hamper its ability to respond quickly to disease threats, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office.

The report says limitations in how the CDC collects and manages contact information from air travelers make contact tracing and tracking public health risks difficult. The agency, the GAO found, “is unable to quickly and accurately identify the number of passengers exposed to a specific infected passenger on a flight.”

Two and a half years after the coronavirus began spreading across the world, the GAO said in a statement Tuesday that the pandemic “has underscored how unprepared America’s public health and aviation systems are to respond to public health threats”.

The GAO findings carry a sense of urgency this summer as tourism and travel have begun to approach pre-pandemic levels, even as Omicron’s BA.5 subvariant is fueling an increase in cases in many countries.

In the United States, reported cases are averaging more than 100,000 a day — a figure that will likely be underestimated given the growing reliance on home testing and mass testing site closures.

The CDC did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday. The GAO noted some changes made by the agency, but said its data systems still needed “substantial improvement.” He said the CDC had “accepted the recommendations” in his report, including that the agency revamp its data system or develop a new one.

US authorities have made efforts to trace travelers who may have contracted Covid-19 abroad. For example, in late November, as Omicron cases spiked in southern Africa, officials ordered airlines to share contact details of passengers who flew from the region to the United States.

The CDC’s data management system was developed in the mid-2000s, according to the GAO report, and “was not designed for rapid assessment or aggregation of public health data on individual cases.” This has hampered the agency, according to the report, meaning the CDC “is unable to effectively analyze and disseminate data to inform public health policy and respond to disease threats.”

Concerns have been raised about the global transmission of highly infectious diseases since the SARS outbreak in the early 2000s.

“More than any other mode of transportation, air travel creates the possibility of infectious diseases moving rapidly from one part of the world to another,” the report said.

The data system used by the CDC prompted contact investigations of about 80 to 130 flights each year from 2015 to 2019, and about 25,000 flights in 2020, according to the report.