Last week, I wrote about the Iowa health department’s move to end COVID-19 case reporting requirements for labs, and in turn stop reporting these data to the CDC. Well, Montana just became the next state to follow this trend.
The state’s public health agency announced that it will stop updating its COVID-19 dashboard on May 5, the week before the federal public health emergency ends, in a note on the dashboard and a statement to local media outlets.
Unlike Iowa, Montana will continue reporting COVID-19 numbers to the CDC; so residents of that state will still be able to find information on the CDC’s dashboard. But the discontinuation of Monatana’s own dashboard shows how the state is taking resources out of pandemic response and treating COVID-19 as an endemic virus—even though it’s not.