Although officials have been warning for weeks of an impending coronavirus resurgence across the country, health experts say it is impossible to know exactly how widespread the nation’s latest resurgence may actually be, given the declining availability of COVID-19 data.
“An effective public health response depends on high quality, real time data,” said Dr. John Brownstein, an epidemiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital and an ABC News contributor. “Underreporting, driven by changes in testing behavior, lack of public interest and severely underfunded local public health departments, create a perfect storm of misleading case counts and hospitalizations.”
Since last summer, dozens of states, along with federal agencies, have opted to scale back on regular COVID-19 data reporting. A dwindling number of states still offer daily COVID-19 data reports, with most now moving to an alternate-day schedule or even to a weekly schedule.
“With changing case definitions for hospitalizations, decreased testing, and increased use of at-home rapid tests, data on COVID-19 in the U.S. has become increasingly hard to interpret,” Sam Scarpino, the vice president of pathogen surveillance at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Pandemic Prevention Institute, told ABC News.
The significant decrease in data reporting and the nationwide decline in public testing have left health experts concerned that officials could be missing viral surges and in the dark about true positivity rates in the country, given the lack of information.
“I think that we’re dramatically undercounting cases. We’re probably only picking up one in seven or one in eight infections. So when we say there’s 30,000 infections a day, it’s probably closer to a quarter of a million infections a day,” FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb said during an appearance on CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday. “They’re concentrated in the Northeast right now. And that’s because a lot of people are testing at home, they’re not presenting for definitive PCR tests, so they’re not getting counted.”
Health experts say official counts, which show small upticks, may actually be significantly higher than counted, as millions of Americans, who are taking at-home tests, rarely report their results to local health agencies
In consequence, testing levels are now at their lowest point since June 2020, with official test numbers dropping by more than 80% since the beginning of the year, with just half a million tests reported daily, compared to 2.5 million tests reported at the nation’s viral peak in January.
Dozens of states have also moved to shutter public testing sites, as at-home COVID-19 tests have become more accessible.
“These are uncharted waters for us with this virus,” Dr. Anthony Fauci told Bloomberg in an interview last week, reiterating that it is impossible to predict how COVID-19 will play out in the months to come.
“We are probably underestimating the number of infections that we’re having right now, because many of the infections are either without symptoms or minimally symptomatic, and you’ll miss that if people do it at home and it’s not reported to a central bank,” Fauci said.
In an effort to monitor the state of the current resurgence, scientists have been closely monitoring other metrics, including wastewater.
In the last 15 days, nearly 60% of wastewater sites monitored by the CDC have reported an increase in the presence of COVID-19 in their samples.
Hospitalization data, once the gold standard, now becoming less straightforward
For many officials, monitoring virus-related COVID-19 hospitalizations has been key to assessing the state of the pandemic. However, in recent months, hospitalization data, too, has become less accessible.
Earlier this year, the…
Read More: US likely ‘dramatically undercounting’ current COVID-19 resurgence, experts say