CNN
—
as of the nation public health emergency expires on May 11, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will stop reporting its color coding Covid-19 Community Levels as a way to track the spread of the infection.
Instead, the CDC will keep an eye on Covid-19 largely by tracking hospitalizations in some areas, according to a source familiar with the agency’s plans.
This is the same way the agency tracks other respiratory infections, like the flu.
Hospitalizations are a lagging indicator: it typically takes a week to 10 days for a person to be hospitalized with a Covid-19 infection. So the change may mean the nation is losing its ability to get the earliest warning of a spike in the spread.
However, wastewater testing in communities and for air passengers will continue and will hopefully close some of those early warning gaps.
“We’re not going to lose full surveillance, but maybe we’ll lose that hyperlocal sensitivity,” the source said.
The agency could announce the end of its community tiers as early as next week, though the timing hasn’t been finalized yet, the person said.
The CDC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The agency adopted its Covid-19 Community Levels in late February 2022. The Community Levels replaced a previous map that color coded counties by the weekly rate of new infections and what percentage of Covid-19 tests came back positive.
The new community tiers shifted the focus to hospitals: how many people were being admitted for Covid-19 and how many beds were left. The model also took into account the weekly rate of new infections in an area.
The impact was immediate. Suddenly, areas that had appeared dark red for high transmission on a map it turned a less threatening yellow or green. Under the new CDC system, masks were no longer recommended for large areas of the country.
The change in metrics will happen out of necessity, the source said.
The end of the public health emergency will mean that the government no longer has the authority to require laboratories to report their Covid-19 test data, which will affect the ability to calculate a metric called percentage positivity.
Covid-19 is a reportable condition, so doctors will still need to report cases to public health officials, but the frequency of that reporting may change. New Mexico, for example, has said it will report its cases monthly going forward.
“Some of the metrics just can’t be maintained due to the change in data reporting,” the person said.
Cases had already become a less reliable way to track community spread, as people switched to home testing and infections went unreported to health authorities.
Currently, 97% of counties and territories in the US have a low level of COVID-19 in the community, with 79 counties at a medium community level and only 15 counties or districts at a high level.
The number of weekly cases of Covid-19 has been steadily declining since January. More than 88,000 new cases of covid-19 and 1,052 deaths were reported in the US last week, according to CDC data.
—————————————————-
Source link