One big lesson from the COVID pandemic

One big lesson from the COVID pandemic: you need solid data to mount an effective response. And that was one of the CDC’s biggest challenges in the early days of COVID-19. Things we know now – like the fact that minority communities were disproportionally impacted – were tough to nail down at the time. That’s because CDC had pretty limited demographic and socioeconomic data on the virus’s impacts. The Health and Human Services Inspector General found the CDC did manage to fill in some those data gaps over time, and some of what it did could help inform future public health responses. Adam Freeman is a deputy inspector general in the OIG’s Office of Evaluation and Inspections. He talked with Federal News Network’s Deputy Editor Jared Serbu.