US Covid Case Count to Go Dark as Public Health Emergency Ends
(Bloomberg) -- The US government’s count of new Covid-19 cases has been dropping for months. Soon, it will disappear entirely.
Thousands of Americans are still contracting the coronavirus each week. But when the public health emergency ends May 11, laboratories across the country will no longer be required to report Covid test results to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That will eventually mean no more weekly infection, transmission and community-level numbers in CDC’s Covid Data Tracker.
Concern about the pandemic is rapidly flagging as infection levels fall to those seen in the earliest months of the outbreak. The World Health Organization also moved to end its global health emergency Friday, lowering its alert level for the pandemic three years after the lethal disease was first seen in China.
US infection data had already become increasingly unreliable as Americans began opting for at-home, rapid Covid tests — which most patients don’t report — rather than laboratory assays, like PCR. CDC will turn its attention to tracking severe Covid illness via hospital admissions, officials said on a call with reporters, while continuing to analyze wastewater and tests of international travelers to determine how the virus is spreading and evolving.
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