A growing number of U.S. states have stopped providing daily updates on the number of new coronavirus cases, hospitalizations and deaths, which, combined with an increase in home tests, the results of which are often not officially recorded, creates a more uneven real-time situation. look at the state of the pandemic.
While most states still report every weekday, according to the New York Times database, more than a dozen have reduced infections to one or two times a week. Arizona, Hawaii, Kentucky, Nevada, Ohio, Oklahoma, and South Carolina switched to weekly reports, as did the District of Columbia. Wyoming switched to reporting twice a week. Further reductions are expected, public health officials said.
Nationwide, the decline in new cases, hospitalizations and deaths is on the decline, and some experts are concerned that the decline in reporting could create blind spots if the pandemic starts to revive.
Many states have recently lifted restrictions on the pandemic, even as the number of cases in Europe has increased again, which has often served as a guide to the pandemic’s trajectory in the US. Although testing has declined in some countries, the number of detected cases worldwide has risen by about 20 percent in the past two weeks, according to the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering.
Several states also slashed the frequency of reporting last summer, just as the wave of new cases from the Delta variant hit. But this time there are key differences, health officials said.
“We’ve moved to a place where we don’t need to know absolute numbers,” said Dr. Marcus Plescia, chief medical officer of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, which represents public health agencies in all 50 states. , Washington, DC, and US territories. “We can still track trends for people who are being tested in public places. We still have a good idea of where the absolute numbers are going.”
He said that the drop in messages won’t necessarily mean states will be less prepared for new waves. Past surges have come from variants that have been internationally discovered and sequenced, including Delta and Omicron. “We had to wait for them to get here,” Dr. Plescia said.
According to Dr. Gigi Gronwall, testing expert and senior fellow at Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Health Security, the benefits of daily reports have also changed.
“We saw it in June, an attempt to report it more like the flu, and then it was justified,” she said. “In June, the number of cases dropped, and we didn’t have Delta yet. We didn’t have a lot of demand and didn’t have rapid antigen tests. Now the government has given tests to literally everyone. People who test positive almost certainly do not report it to their health departments. So the data is pretty shaky.”
She said other metrics are more valuable at the moment, such as the number of hospitalizations and vaccinations, and wastewater surveillance.
Dr. Plescia agreed, saying now is a good time to align Covid reports with how public health agencies track other infectious diseases. He said the result would be a more complete picture of the coronavirus trajectory because there would be more time to smooth out fluctuations in daily data. In fact, the daily data “does not necessarily affect the interventions we consider,” he said.
However, some researchers have warned that cuts in government reporting on pandemic numbers pose a threat to response time.
“Infectious diseases like SARS-CoV-2 spread very quickly, and so we need to respond quickly to early signals of an increase in cases or a new variant,” said Dr. Sam Scarpino, managing director of pathogen surveillance at Rockefeller Foundation Institute for Pandemic Prevention. . “Early action prevents school closures, masks mandates and saves lives. However, if we wait days, weeks or months for new data, it’s hard to see signals fast enough.”
Sarah Cahalan and Lisa Vaananen Jones provided reporting.