CDC will stop reporting new COVID cases daily and instead rely on hospitalization data to track COVID severity.
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CDC will stop reporting new COVID cases daily and instead rely on hospitalization data to track COVID severity.
Image of Spencer Platt/Getty
In the latest sign that the pandemic is easing, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday announced plans to shrink the data it will regularly report on COVID-19.
But CDC officials insist that information the agency will continue to collect and regularly post on it website will still provide the metrics needed to monitor the coronavirus and identify and respond to any new threats.
“We will continue to keep an eye on the COVID-19 ball,” Dr. Nirav Shah, vice president of the CDC, told reporters when announcing the change. “And will do so through a multitude of metrics.”
Changes prompted by The impending end of the Public Health Emergency will expire on May 11.
One of the biggest changes is that the agency will no longer regularly monitor and publish the number of new COVID cases. That’s largely because states will no longer have to report new cases. In addition, home testing, most of which is not reported to authorities, has made new infections a less reliable metric, Shah said.
Instead, the agency will begin to rely on the number of people hospitalized with COVID as an indicator of how widespread the virus is. ONE CDC’s analysis of the new approach released on Friday confirmed it would take effect, Shah said.
CDC will also continue to monitor and report how many people die from COVID and how often people become so sick that they need emergency room care.
Monitoring wastewater for the virus, as well as the percentage of people who test positive for the virus – “test positive” – will provide additional key indicators, he said.
In addition, the agency will continue to monitor genetic analyzes of the virus, including among international visitors toto detect any new, potentially disturbing variations.
The changes come as no surprise to independent public health experts.
“Overall some good news here,” wrote Sam Scarpino, an infectious disease researcher at Northeastern University in an email to NPR. “Continuing wastewater treatment, traveler screening and genome sequencing will be critical to ensuring the infrastructure is maintained for the next time we need it.”
But others expressed concern that investments in public health were being withdrawn.
“This is not surprising but is further evidence that these investments are always temporary and not part of a long-term strategy to become a better steward of public health data. “, he said. Beth Blauer, who helped run a highly respected COVID data tracking tool at Johns Hopkins that has since shut down stop working March.
Others fear that the changes will lead to patchy oversight measures.
“Wastewater monitoring … is really imprecise, so there will be much of this country unsupervised,” writes Jennifer Nuzzohead of Brown University’s Pandemic Center, in an email.
“I’m most worried about how we track hospitalizations,” she said. “At this point in the pandemic, the number of hospital admissions is the best indicator of whether the level of infection that is occurring is causing disruption. But we are scaling back the level of hospital data we have. collecting.”
Nuzzo also argues that “we should use this period of relative quiet to increase surveillance for serious respiratory infections that send people to the hospital.”
That’s important because “we’re still trying to categorize people hospitalized for or because of COVID, and the reduction in how often data is reported makes it difficult to analyze the data and interpret what they mean.” It also makes it harder to act quickly.”
Scarpino agrees that there could be a problem.
“Moving from state-to-regional data and removing county-level risk will result in even less public and media interest,” he wrote in an email.
Scarpino noted: “Despite our achievements, the death toll is still too high. According to CDC data, they are currently hovering around 1,100 per week. To date, there have been 1.1 million COVID-19 deaths in the US.
“The CDC should redirect efforts to understand in as real time as possible what is driving state and regional variation in mortality,” he said.
The move to downsize some of its data collection efforts, he said, “signals that the CDC has given up on reducing mortality, which is unacceptable.”
Editing by Carmel Wroth.
