As emergency ends, CDC cuts some COVID monitoring
Agency will track the spread alongside other diseases and will scale back community data.
Acknowledging that it is losing some of its eyes and ears across the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has unveiled a scaled-down COVID-19 surveillance system for the post-pandemic era.
The CDC’s new monitoring network won’t have the fine resolution on the coronavirus that the agency strove for during early stages of the pandemic. But it will lash together a raft of new and existing tools to keep an eye on the virus while also keeping broader tabs on the public’s health.
With the end of the federal government’s 3-year-old public health emergency, the agency will begin to track COVID-19 cases alongside other respiratory illnesses, said Dr. Nirav D. Shah, the CDC’s principal deputy director. New cases of the pandemic virus, which has caused 1.1 million deaths in the U.S. and 6.9 million worldwide, will eventually be lumped with influenza, respiratory syncytial virus and other infections that can cause pneumonia and death in humans.
The CDC will still be able to alert communities to upticks in coronavirus spread based on continued tracking of emergency department visits, COVID-19 hospitalizations and wastewater surveillance from sewage plants. Reliable statistics on COVID-19 deaths will lag behind other data.
Shah said the CDC’s plan will yield a picture of the coronavirus that is “superior” to the data it gathers on flu and RSV. However, the agency’s website will no longer offer details on local conditions, and the data that will be posted will be updated less frequently.
“CDC will continue to closely monitor COVID-19 and provide the information to which we have access,” Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the agency’s outgoing director, told members of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions on Thursday. “But the end of the [public health emergency] means the CDC will no longer be able to collect data and share information many Americans have come to expect.”
For instance, the CDC’s color-coded community risk maps, which have provided county-level assessments of coronavirus spread and of hospitals’ capacity to care for infected patients, will be discontinued, Shah said.
Adopted in February 2022, the maps relied heavily on Americans’ willingness to get tested at labs and clinics, which in turn reported numbers of new infections to the CDC. But milder infections have prompted less testing, and at-home testing has become the norm — trends that have dried up the CDC’s sources of reliable localized data. Indeed, in recent months, experts have concluded that the CDC’s count of new cases is no longer a reliable measure of the coronavirus’ spread.
At the same time, many states and counties have stopped gathering or reporting COVID-19 data. That has added to the difficulty of maintaining local risk maps and of documenting disparities based on race and ethnicity, Walensky said.
The CDC will also lose some insight into the demographics of people seeking vaccines. Most, though not all, states and territories have pledged to continue to share the age, gender and ethnicity of people being vaccinated for COVID-19. But those details will no longer be updated regularly on the CDC website.
“We will make do,” Walensky said on Capitol Hill. “However, this should worry us all, primarily because of what it says about the visibility we will have into the next outbreak. We will be back to Square One.”
To monitor the virus, the CDC will rely on an established network of healthcare systems and public health departments across the U.S. that already help the agency monitor respiratory and other illnesses. They will supply real-time data on patients being treated for COVID-19, and the CDC will comb through death certificates for information about COVID-19 fatalities. Surveillance networks such as RESP-NET, meanwhile, will continue to collect lab data on respiratory viruses.