Nuzzo also argues that "we should be using this period of relative quiet to strengthen our surveillance of serious respiratory infections that land people in the hospital." But we are scaling back the level of hospital data we are collecting." "At this point in the pandemic, hospitalizations are the best indicator of whether the level of infections that are occurring will be disruptive. "I am most worried about how we track hospitalizations," she says.
really spotty, so there'd be large parts of the country not covered by this surveillance," wrote Jennifer Nuzzo, who heads Brown University's Pandemic Center, in an email. Others are concerned that the changes will result in patchwork surveillance measures. "For states to abandon the reporting of key metrics on the spread of the virus to the CDC simply because they are no longer legally required to do so is an abdication of our government's collective responsibility to keep the public informed and protect the lives and livelihoods of all Americans," they wrote. This "will severely deplete the government's newly acquired arsenal of disease data surveillance," she wrote in another email with her colleague Lauren Gardner. Under the new changes, state and local health departments are no longer required to report certain COVID data to the federal government. "This comes as no surprise at all but is further evidence that these investments were always temporary and not part of a long term strategy to be better public health data stewards," Beth Blauer, who helped run a highly respected COVID data tracker at Johns Hopkins that ceased operation ceased operation in March, wrote in an email.īlauer says she's also concerned that the nation's public health system was reverting to pre-pandemic standards. "Continuing wastewater, traveler screening, and genome sequencing will be important to ensure the infrastructure is maintained for the next time we need it."īut others voiced concern that investments in public health were being rolled back. "Overall some good news here," wrote Sam Scarpino, an infectious disease researcher at Northeastern University in an email to NPR. The changes didn't surprise independent public health experts. In addition, the agency will continue to monitor genetic analyses of the virus, including among arriving international travelers, to spot any new, potentially worrisome variants. Wastewater monitoring for the virus will provide additional crucial metrics, he says.
The CDC will also continue to monitor and report how many people are dying from COVID as well as how often people are getting so sick they end up requiring care in emergency rooms.
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