Feature

As COVID tracking wanes, are we letting our guard down too soon?


 

The 30-second commercial, part of the government’s We Can Do This campaign, shows everyday people going about their lives, then reminds them that, “because COVID is still out there and so are you,” it might be time to update your vaccine.

But in real life, the message that COVID-19 is still a major concern is muffled if not absent for many. Many data tracking sources, both federal and others, are no longer reporting, as often, the number of COVID cases, hospitalizations, and deaths.

The Department of Health & Human Services in February stopped updating its public COVID data site, instead directing all queries to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which itself has been updating only weekly instead of daily since 2022.

Nongovernmental sources, such as John Hopkins University, stopped reporting pandemic data in March, The New York Times also ended its COVID data-gathering project in March, stating that “the comprehensive real-time reporting that The Times has prioritized is no longer possible.” It will rely on reporting weekly CDC data moving forward.

Along with the tracking sites, masking and social distancing mandates have mostly disappeared. President Joe Biden signed a bipartisan bill on April 10 that ended the national emergency for COVID. While some programs will stay in place for now, such as free vaccines, treatments, and tests, that too will go away when the federal public health emergency expires on May 11. The HHS already has issued its transition roadmap.

Many Americans, meanwhile, are still on the fence about the pandemic. A Gallup poll from March shows that about half of the American public say it’s over, and about half disagree.

Are we closing up shop on COVID-19 too soon, or is it time? Not surprisingly, experts don’t agree. Some say the pandemic is now endemic – which broadly means the virus and its patterns are predictable and steady in designated regions – and that it’s critical to catch up on health needs neglected during the pandemic, such as screenings and other vaccinations

But others don’t think it’s reached that stage yet, saying that we are letting our guard down too soon and we can’t be blind to the possibility of another strong variant – or pandemic – emerging. Surveillance must continue, not decline, and be improved.

Time to move on?

In its transition roadmap released in February, the HHS notes that daily COVID reported cases are down over 90%, compared with the peak of the Omicron surge at the end of January 2022; deaths have declined by over 80%; and new hospitalizations caused by COVID have dropped by nearly 80%.

It is time to move on, said Ali Mokdad, PhD, a professor and chief strategy officer of population health at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, Seattle.

“Many people were delaying a lot of medical care, because they were afraid” during COVID’s height, he said, explaining that elective surgeries were postponed, prenatal care went down, as did screenings for blood pressure and diabetes.

His institute was tracking COVID projections every week but stopped in December.

As for emerging variants, “we haven’t seen a variant that scares us since Omicron” in November 2021, said Dr. Mokdad, who agrees that COVID is endemic now. The subvariants that followed it are very similar, and the current vaccines are working.

“We can move on, but we cannot drop the ball on keeping an eye on the genetic sequencing of the virus,” he said. That will enable quick identification of new variants.

If a worrisome new variant does surface, Dr. Mokdad said, certain locations and resources will be able to gear up quickly, while others won’t be as fast, but overall the United States is in a much better position now.

Amesh Adalja, MD, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, Baltimore, also believes the pandemic phase is behind us

“This can’t be an emergency in perpetuity,” he said “Just because something is not a pandemic [anymore] does not mean that all activities related to it cease.”

COVID is highly unlikely to overwhelm hospitals again, and that was the main reason for the emergency declaration, he said.

“It’s not all or none – collapsing COVID-related [monitoring] activities into the routine monitoring that is done for other infectious disease should be seen as an achievement in taming the virus,” he said.

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