RECOVER, the U.S.’s largest initiative to understand Long COVID, published a major scientific study this week in JAMA. The paper goes over key Long COVID symptoms and other findings from nearly 10,000 adults who have joined the project’s research cohort. Its authors propose a new, more specific definition for Long COVID, which will be used in future studies from this project.
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Last week, I gave you an overview of the changes coming with the end of the federal public health emergency (PHE). This week, I’d like to focus on the health equity implications of the PHE’s end. With the end of extra supplies and resources tied to the emergency, people who are already vulnerable to other health issues will become more at risk for COVID-19.
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We’re now less than one week out from May 11, when the federal public health emergency (or PHE) for COVID-19 will end. While this change doesn’t actually signify that COVID-19 is no longer worth worrying about, it marks a major shift in how U.S. governments will respond to the ongoing pandemic, including how the disease is tracked and what public services are available. Here’s all the key info you should know about this, in one place.
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After May 11, the CDC will stop reporting COVID-19 Community Levels, according to reporting by Brenda Goodman at CNN. The agency is overall planning to shift from using case data to hospitalizations and wastewater surveillance.
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We are in an era of dashboard shutdowns. Government agencies, research groups, and media organizations alike are winding down their COVID-19 reporting efforts. So, here’s a list of dashboards that have NOT yet shut down.
Read MoreSources and updates for the week of May 28 include new Long COVID papers, FDA approval for Paxlovid, bivalent vaccine protection, and more.
Read MoreAnswering reader questions about interpreting wastewater surveillance data, rapid test accuracy, and Paxlovid access.
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The COVID-19 plateau continues, with hospital admissions and viral levels in wastewater (the two main metrics I’m looking at these days) both trending slightly down at the national level. Newer Omicron variants are still on the rise, but don’t seem to be impacting transmission much yet.
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This past week, Virginia’s health department added a new wastewater surveillance section to its COVID-19 dashboard. The new section includes a map of testing sites, coronavirus trends by site, viral loads over time, and plenty of text explaining how to interpret the data.
Read MoreSources and updates for the week of May 21 include new funding from the CDC’s forecasting center, keeping masks in healthcare, drug overdoses, and more.
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Nationwide, COVID-19 spread in the U.S. continues to be in a somewhat-middling plateau: lower than the massive amount of Omicron transmission we all got used to throughout late 2022, but still higher than the lulls between outbreaks we saw in prior years.
Read MoreA few months ago, I wrote about how testing sewage from airplanes could be a valuable way to keep tabs on the coronavirus variants circulating around the world. This spring, San Francisco International Airport became the first in the U.S. to actually start doing this tracking; I covered their new initiative for Science News.
Read MoreSources and updates for the week of May 14 include new CDC ventilation guidance, a Long COVID and ME/CFS demonstration, COVID-19 test prices, and more.
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On Thursday, the CDC revamped its COVID-19 dashboard in response to changing data availability with the end of the federal public health emergency. The new dashboard downplays continued COVID-19 risk across the U.S., by prioritizing hospitalizations and deaths over other metrics.
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