California to end posting COVID hospitalization data
California will no longer provide weekly updates to the public on COVID-19 hospital admissions because the federal regulation that requires hospitals to report the data will end after April 30.
As a result, new COVID hospital admissions — a key indicator of severe COVID disease in a community — will no longer appear on the state’s respiratory virus dashboard, which provides weekly updates on new hospital admissions for COVID and influenza, as well as test positivity and deaths for both viruses.
Federal health officials signaled this change in 2023, when the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said the requirement for hospitals to report COVID hospital admissions data would shift from daily to weekly after May 2023 and eventually end after April 2024.
California officially withdrew its COVID public health emergency declaration in February 2023.
California will continue to track COVID test positivity and deaths and post that information on the dashboard, “at least in the short term,” state epidemiologist Dr. Erica Pan said Tuesday during a briefing with the California Medical Association.
The state also maintains wastewater surveillance to track COVID trends.
“Stay tuned for how we’ll be doing respiratory surveillance for the next season,” Pan said.
It’s not clear whether, after April 30, California will monitor COVID hospitalizations the way it monitors flu hospitalizations, which is to collect data from some but not all hospitals in the state through its decadesold surveillance network known as Sentinel.
The California Department of Public Health did not immediately respond to questions.
Infectious disease experts say removing COVID hospitalization data from public view could be a problem for higherrisk patients, such as those with underlying conditions or older nursing home residents who are more likely to develop serious disease.
Such people may track hospitalization trends to help decide when to take extra precautions or get their next booster shot.
And with each of the past four summers seeing a bump in COVID infections, now may not be the best time to pull the information from public view.
“This is one of the last few data points left standing that people can use to judge not only how society is doing, but how they should be protecting themselves,” said Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease specialist and associate dean for regional campuses at UCSF. “I’m not sure we’re completely out of the woods yet.”
At the same time, it’s understandable that the reporting requirement for hospitals is ending because federal COVID funding is getting scaled way back and it takes considerable personnel and effort to maintain this level of data reporting, Chin-Hong said.
Hospitals are stretched so thin that most would probably not continue reporting the data if it’s not mandatory, he said.