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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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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A lot of healthcare organizations have ended mask mandates in recent months, many of them citing guidance changes at state or local levels. This is likely another case of health agencies and organizations making changes that are, in fact, very dangerous for their patients.
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The trend continues: COVID-19 spread is still on the decline across the U.S., but it’s a slow decline. These updates are getting pretty repetitive to write, as we’ve been seeing this pattern since late January—which, honestly, I’m taking as a good sign.
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The national COVID-19 plateau continues. As I’ve been saying for a few weeks now, COVID-19 spread has dropped significantly from its high during the winter holidays, but it has not fallen to the low levels we’ve previously seen this time of year due to a combination of lax precautions and the latest Omicron variant, XBB.1.5.
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It’s now undeniable that Thanksgiving led to a jump in COVID-19 spread: officially-reported cases went up 50% this past week compared to the week of the holiday, following the trend that we first saw in wastewater data. Hospital admissions for COVID-19 also continue to go up.
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I recently received a question from a reader, asking how to follow both COVID-19 and the flu in the county where she lives. For COVID-19, county-level data sources aren’t too hard to find; for the flu, this is much harder.
Read MoreSources and updates for the week of May 29 include potential changes to hospitalization data reporting, new research on Omicron subvariants, and more.
Read MoreSources and updates for the week of May 15 include COVID-19 deaths that could’ve been prevented by vaccines, the CDC potentially losing access to key data, testing declines, and more.
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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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