Fast Facts
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention collects information on air passengers to help local public health authorities trace the potential spread of communicable diseases (e.g., COVID-19).
But some of the ways in which CDC collects and manages passengers’ information make it harder to effectively facilitate contact tracing. For example, the outdated data management system CDC uses doesn’t allow it to connect related cases or easily report the number of passengers exposed to a single infected person on a flight.
We recommended ways to improve CDC’s air passenger data system…
Recommendations
GAO is making three recommendations, including that CDC redesign its data management system for air passenger information or deploy a new one. CDC concurred with the recommendation…
