Copyright 2023 by Alan M. Puckett
The latest:
For three years now, I’ve followed national and local pandemic data—numbers of new coronavirus cases, COVID hospitalizations, and COVID deaths—and have also recorded anecdotal notes about how the pandemic has affected daily life in my community and around the country. One thing that was clear right from the start was that the country was caught in a profound tug-of-war between science and politics in dealing with the coronavirus pandemic. Well, Duh!, you say. But it’s really been a big deal, and perhaps more than any other factor this ongoing struggle has defined how the pandemic has unfolded in the U.S. In case anybody’s forgotten, we’ve lost well over a million American lives in this pandemic, with more dying daily. Our country is in a league of its own in terms of failing to cope effectively with COVID, despite having pulled together safe and effective vaccines in record time.
The failure of national, state and local “leaders” in the U.S. to implement fact-based policies in dealing with COVID-19 has largely continued under the Biden Administration, unfortunately, and it’s been discouraging to watch publicly-available sources of pandemic data—including what had been regularly-published summaries from the CDC, Johns Hopkins, and the New York Times—dry up during recent months due to an increasing scarcity of data and the discontinuation of timely data reporting from states. At this point it’s pretty much impossible to track local hotspots, the emergence of new variants, etc., in anything close to real time. Have we learned anything over the past three years? We’re pretending that the pandemic is “Over” and are now essentially flying blind in terms of tracking COVID.
But it’s not over. Around 150 Americans still die of COVID every day—more than 50,000 of us per year—based on the most recent CDC weekly data summary. Risk of severe illness and Long COVID remain serious threats as well. Unless we dramatically improve public health reporting policies and data infrastructure in this country we will remain needlessly vulnerable to new surges of the coronavirus pandemic, and to the emergence of new disease pathogens when—not if—those arise. By telling ourselves that “It’s Over” we are playing a high-stakes game of make-believe here, head-in-the-sand folly of the first order.
And we seem determined to continue the ostrich act. A piece published yesterday on the Website of The Guardian reports that the CDC is said to be finalizing plans to stop tracking the spread of COVID at the community level around the U.S. and to rely primarily on tracking COVID hospitalizations instead—“…signaling what could be the federal government’s readiness to reconsider priorities in its approach to the pandemic despite the World Health Organization’s declaration that it is still ongoing.”
Given that, I was heartened to see this op-ed in the NYT today, written by four co-authors who helped to build and operate the now-disbanded Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. That program was one of the principal COVID data tracking centers in the U.S. throughout most of the pandemic. The authors voice clearly and with the authority of their time in the trenches the dangers we face in allowing the U.S. to become a public health data desert. It’s one of the most important pieces of writing about public policy responses to COVID that I’ve read since the pandemic began, and thanks to its publication in a high-profile media venue will make it a bit more difficult for some who really should know better to keep up the ostrich charade about public health data. We can only hope that enough policymakers in the right places will manage to tear themselves away from the panting fray of our fractious politics long enough to read it.
Stay safe, I’ll keep you posted.
thepointedquillblog@wordpress.com 