CDC launches new pandemic forecasting center

April 24, 2022.Reading time 8 minutes.

This week, the CDC introduced a new team focused on modeling infectious diseases, called the Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics (or CFA). The agency aims to hire about 100 scientists and communicators for the center; they’ll currently focus on COVID-19, but will expand to other diseases in the future.

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The CDC’s isolation guidance is not based on data

April 17, 2022.Reading time 14 minutes.

Remember how, in December, the CDC changed its recommendations for people who’d tested positive for COVID-19 to isolating for only five days instead of ten? And a bunch of experts were like, “Wait a second, I’m not sure if that’s sound science?” Well, studies since this guidance was changed have shown that, actually, a lot of people with COVID-19 are still contagious after five days. Yet the CDC has not revised its guidance at all.

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New CDC mortality data release from the Documenting COVID-19 project

April 10, 2022.Reading time 6 minutes.

The Documenting COVID-19 project recently released a GitHub data repository that provides county-level CDC mortality data from 2020 and 2021. We’re hoping other reporters will use it to investigate deaths during the pandemic in their regions.

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All the U.S.’s COVID-19 metrics are flawed

March 27, 2022.Reading time 23 minutes.

This week, I had a big retrospective story published at FiveThirtyEight: I looked back at the major metrics that the U.S. has used to track COVID-19 over the past two years—and how our country’s fractured public health system hindered our use of each one.

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Pandemic preparedness: Improving our data surveillance and communication

March 13, 2022.Reading time 14 minutes.

What has the U.S. learned from the last two years, and what lessons can we take forward for future COVID-19 surges and other infectious disease outbreaks? The Biden administration has released a new pandemic preparedness plan that addresses these questions.

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Five more things, February 27

February 27, 2022.Reading time 3 minutes.

Additional news items for the week of February 27 include the CDC withholding data, BA.2 updates, and rapid testing out of isolation.

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Why the CDC changed its masking guidance, and which metrics to follow right now

February 27, 2022.Reading time 21 minutes.

This past Friday, the CDC announced a major shift to its guidance for determining COVID-19 safety measures based on county-level community metrics. The new guidance is intended to replace COVID-19 thresholds that the agency developed last summer, during the Delta wave; here, the CDC is promoting a shift from using cases and test positivity for local decision-making to using metrics tied directly to the healthcare system.

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Five more things, February 20

February 20, 2022.Reading time 5 minutes.

A few additional news items from this week, including U.S. deaths caused by Omicron, failure to meet WHO vaccination targets, and a large event that turned out to not be a superspreader.

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Answering reader questions: Encouraging policy changes

February 13, 2022.Reading time 13 minutes.

In this post, I’m answering reader questions about how individuals can impact COVID-19 policies. Such questions feel particularly pertinent this week, as leaders of several states loosen up on mask mandates and other COVID-19 safety measures.

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The CDC is finally publishing wastewater data—but only ten states are well-represented

February 6, 2022.Reading time 12 minutes.

This week, the CDC added wastewater tracking to its COVID-19 data dashboard. Wastewater has been an important COVID-tracking tool throughout the pandemic, but it gained more public interest in recent months as Omicron’s rapid spread showed the utility of this early warning system. While the CDC’s new wastewater tracker offers a decent picture of national COVID-19 trends, it’s basically useless for local data in the majority of states.

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