The gist: The omicron variant is continuing to subside, but its surge was one of the deadliest waves weve seen in Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, Philadelphias promise of $100 for folks who get vaccinated now isnt drawing big crowds, and Pennsylvania schools have likewise been slow to take up a free testing program offered by the state. Vaccines, meanwhile, remain an important tool in fighting the pandemic and they may also help combat long-haul COVID-19, a study has found.
Tell us: Phillys offering $100 for people who get vaccinated. What do you think could encourage vaccinations? Send us a note, and well share some responses in next weeks newsletter. Please keep it to 35 words.
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Nick Vadala (@njvadala, health@inquirer.com)
Despite it being less likely to cause severe illness and death than previous COVID-19 strains, deaths from the highly transmissible omicron variant were still high due to the sheer number of people infected during the latest surge. As a result, more than 9,000 Pennsylvanians have died from COVID-19 since Dec. 1, giving the state one of the nations highest per-capita death rates in what has been called one of the most deadly waves weve seen.
Hospitals throughout Pennsylvania and New Jersey are reporting dramatic drops in COVID-19 patients as the omicron surge continues to subside.
A promise of $100 for people getting vaccinated against COVID-19 hasnt brought big crowds to Philadelphias clinics at least not yet.
Despite spikes in coronavirus infections and low child vaccination rates, schools across Pennsylvania have been slow to enroll in a free testing program.
Long-haul COVID-19, often shortened to long COVID, is less common among people who were vaccinated, a review of multiple studies has found.
Philly-area schools are increasingly ending mask mandates, but how and when theyre deciding to do so is dividing communities.
Delco is the most populous Pennsylvania county without a health department. It is, however, getting one very soon, officials say.
Some Philly restaurant owners are choosing to keep requiring proof of vaccination.
Penn States THON, a 46-hour dance marathon, returned for its 50th year with new safety protocols.
Phillys health department clowned rapper Nicky Minaj over a controversial COVID-19 comment, and a Twitter storm erupted.
Coronavirus cases and hospitalizations are declining in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Track the latest data here.
Last week, we asked what you think about the vaccine mandate for indoor dining ending. Heres what you told us:
Back to cooking at home. Close quarters, everyone unmasked, everyone speaking up because restaurants are loud; Im not going to be comfortable eating out anymore.
To me, this seems like a cheap campaign move and further erodes the public trust in the health department and city council. Such a disappointment.
Youre forcing maskless conscientious people to sit amongst a crowd of irresponsible unvaccinated people. No thank you, I opt for Jersey Mikes takeout subs.
Glad to see the vaccine mandate go! Doubt it did any good but scare off some restaurant goers like myself who chose to eat outside the city during this time. Hope this provides some relief to restaurant owners and workers!
This is a great way for the city to make even more spaces inaccessible for vulnerable people.
Its not over yet. People concerned about the economy always take steps too quickly and that doesnt work. A few more weeks could make a difference in the return back to normal.
This move may placate the unvaccinated, but it will take away the pleasure and possibly the safety of indoor dining for many.
Presales for the Franklin Institutes highly anticipated Harry Potter exhibition eclipsed presales for all other shows at the museum since 2007. But is it, you know, any good? We took a young Harry Potter fan to check it out and get the skinny on this massive, 20,000-square-foot show. From boggarts to Quidditch, heres what you have to look forward to.
Birria tacos are big right now, and Philly has plenty of meaty, crispy options on offer to satiate all your savory cravings but here are the real standouts.
Burned out on your day-to-day corporate grind? Do like this Fishtown woman did and give it all up to make handheld fishing nets prized by fly fishermen around the world.
Philly (understandably) still has James Harden fever, so here are 13 things you need to know about the newest Sixer.
The social isolation the pandemic has caused is tough, but this group of friends has a unique remedy: Dominoes. Spread across Philly, New York City, New Jersey, and Virginia, they meet twice a week nearly every week for two years now on Zoom to catch up and play a game of bones. Their name? The DominOsos, which loosely translates as the dominos playing bears.
A new analysis says that COVID-19 vaccines are unlikely to trigger a rare inflammatory condition linked to coronavirus infection in kids
By LINDSEY TANNER AP Medical Writer
February 22, 2022, 11:42 PM
4 min read
COVID-19 vaccines are unlikely to trigger a rare inflammatory condition linked to coronavirus infection in children, according to an analysis of U.S. government data published Tuesday.
The condition, formally known as multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children, involves fever plus symptoms affecting at least two organs and often includes stomach pain, skin rash or bloodshot eyes. It's a rare complication in kids who have had COVID-19, and very rarely affects adults. The condition often leads to hospitalization, but most patients recover.
First reported in the United Kingdom in early 2020, it is sometimes mistaken for Kawasaki disease, which can cause swelling and heart problems. Since February 2020, more than 6,800 cases have been reported in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
As part of COVID-19 vaccine safety monitoring, the CDC and U.S. Food and Drug Administration added the condition to a list of several potential adverse events of special interest. A few cases reported in people with no detectable evidence of coronavirus infection prompted researchers at the CDC and elsewhere to undertake the new analysis, which was published Tuesday in The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health.
The possibility that the vaccines could somehow prompt the condition is only theoretical and the analysis found no evidence that it did, said co-author Dr. Buddy Creech, a Vanderbilt University pediatric infectious disease specialist who is leading a study of Moderna shots in children.
We dont know what the exact contribution of the vaccine to these illnesses is, Creech said. Vaccine alone in absence of a preceding infection appears not to be a substantial trigger.
The analysis involved surveillance data for the first nine months of COVID-19 vaccination in the U.S., from December 2020 through August 2021. During that time, the FDA authorized Pfizers COVID-19 shots for ages 16 and up; expanded that in May to ages 12 through 15; and authorized Moderna and Johnson & Johnson shots for ages 18 and up.
More than 21 million people aged 12 to 20 received at least one vaccine dose during that time. Twenty-one of them developed the inflammatory condition afterward. All had received Pfizer shots, the analysis found. Fifteen of the 21 had laboratory evidence of a previous COVID-19 infection that could have triggered the condition.
The remaining six had no evidence of a previous infection, but the researchers said they could not conclude definitively that theyd never had COVID-19 or some other infection that could have led to the inflammatory condition. Kids with COVID-19 often have no symptoms and many never get tested.
The results suggest that the inflammatory condition may occur after vaccination in 1 in 1 million children who have had COVID-19, and in 1 in 3 million who have no detectable evidence of previous COVID-19 infection.
Most kids who had COVID-19 dont develop the post-infection illness, but it is estimated to happen at a significantly higher rate than both of those post-vaccination figures. In April to June 2020, the rate was 200 cases per million in unvaccinated infected people aged 12-20 in the U.S.
Their findings overall are quite reassuring, Dr. Mary Beth Son of Boston Childrens Hospital wrote in a commentary accompanying the study.
Dr. Adam Ratner, a pediatrician-scientist at New York University Langone Health, said the results show that chances are super rare for the shots to prompt an immune response that could lead to the inflammatory condition. By contrast, theres strong evidence that vaccination protects kids from getting COVID-19 as well as the condition, Ratner said.
Follow AP Medical Writer Lindsey Tanner at @LindseyTanner.
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institutes Department of Science Education.
Is omicron leading us closer to herd immunity against COVID-19?
Experts say it's not likely that the highly transmissible variant or any other variant will lead to herd immunity.
Herd immunity is an elusive concept and doesnt apply to coronavirus, says Dr. Don Milton at the University of Maryland School of Public Health.
Herd immunity is when enough of a population is immune to a virus that its hard for the germ to spread to those who arent protected by vaccination or a prior infection.
For example, herd immunity against measles requires about 95% of a community to be immune. Early hopes of herd immunity against the coronavirus faded for several reasons.
One is that antibodies developed from available vaccines or previous infection dwindle with time. While vaccines offer strong protection against severe illness, waning antibodies mean it's still possible to get infected even for those who are boosted.
Then there's the huge variation in vaccinations. In some low-income countries, less than 5% of the population is vaccinated. Rich countries are struggling with vaccine hesitancy. And young children still aren't eligible in many places.
READ MORE: Does the COVID-19 vaccine interfere with mammograms? | Expert Opinion
As long as the virus spreads, it mutates helping the virus survive and giving rise to new variants. Those mutants such as omicron can become better at evading the protection people have from vaccines or an earlier infection.
Populations are moving toward herd resistance, where infections will continue, but people have enough protection that future spikes won't be as disruptive to society, Milton says.
Many scientists believe COVD-19 will eventually become like the flu and cause seasonal outbreaks but not huge surges.
COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) The Ohio Department of Health has released the latest number of COVID-19 cases in the state.
Numbers as of Tuesday, Feb. 22 follow:
The 21-day case average is below2,900.
The department reported1,764people started the vaccination process, bringing the total to7,214,879which is 61.72% of the states population. And3,162received booster shots.
The Ohio Hospital Association reported the following numbers related to COVID-19 patients:
Data from the Ohio Department of Health shows hospitalizations are down nearly 80% from the all-time high six weeks ago, causing some encouragement for state doctors. Schools in the state are also reporting its lowest case numberssince the beginning of the school year.
With Omicron fading and pressure growing to ease mask rules and other pandemic restrictions, there is growing debate among health officials and experts about if or when a second booster shot will be part of this path toward recovery.
Vaccines and boosters proved highly effective against serious illness from Omicron. But what is also clear, though, is that the defense afforded by vaccines while still robust tends to wane over time, leaving even some vaccinated and boosted individuals more vulnerable than others.
Data released earlier this month by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention examined people who got a booster shot of a Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccine after completing a two-dose primary vaccination series.
During a time where Omicron was the dominant coronavirus variant, vaccine effectiveness against COVID-related emergency department or urgent care visits for people was 87% during the two months after the booster shot, but that fell to 81% during the third month and dropped to 66% for the fourth month after the booster.
I think thats kind of a word of caution, said Dr. George Rutherford, a epidemiologist and infectious diseases expert at UC San Francisco.
A subsequent booster would seemingly help address the issue of waning immunity. But not everyone is convinced a second booster will be needed anytime soon.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Bidens chief medical advisor, noted last week that a single booster shot still provides high levels of protection against severe disease. During the Omicron surge, vaccine effectiveness against COVID-19-related hospitalization was 91% during the two months after the booster, fell to 88% during the third month and dropped to 78% for the fourth month, according to data published by the CDC.
Nonetheless, the level of 78 is still a good protective area, Fauci said, adding that he and other officials will continue studying the need for a second booster shot. Recommendations, if needed, will be updated according to the data as it evolves.
The CDC has already recommended that those age 12 and older with moderate or severely compromised immune systems who have already received three doses of vaccinations of the Pfizer or Moderna shots get a fourth dose.
For immune compromised people who got the Johnson and Johnson vaccination as their primary inoculation and have already received a second dose of vaccine, officials now recommend an additional shot, for a total of three doses.
But, in terms of universal boosting, I dont think thats where were going to go anytime soon, Rutherford said, although its possible we may eventually get around to it.
Its not just U.S. officials that are weighing the issue. Some other countries, such as Sweden, the United Kingdom and Israel, are making second booster doses available to certain populations such as residents who are older or at higher risk of severe health impacts from COVID-19.
Dr. Robert Wachter, chair of UC San Franciscos Department of Medicine, tweeted Saturday that evidence of efficacy of second booster from Israel is mixed, however, so I doubt well have one soon in U.S.; maybe by the fall, as a prelude to an annual COVID shot.
Personally, second boost would make me more comfy going maskless, but Im OK waiting for additional data, Wachter added.
For most of those living in the U.S., an additional booster dose would mean four shots total an initial two-dose series of either the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines, plus two subsequent boosters. The shots manufactured by Pfizer and Moderna are collectively known as mRNA vaccines.
For those who initially got the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine, a second booster would mean a third overall shot.
The potential future [recommendation] for an additional boost or a fourth shot for mRNA or a third shot for J&J is being very carefully monitored in real time. And recommendations, if needed, will be updated according to the data as it evolves, Fauci said last week.
In San Francisco, health officials have moved ahead of federal guidance and are already allowing Johnson & Johnson recipients to get a second booster shot.
Despite ongoing discussions around the wisdom of even further boosting, many officials say their top priority at the moment is getting more residents to avail themselves of the additional shot for which theyre already eligible.
Recipients of either the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines should get boosted at least five months after completing their initial two-dose series, according to the CDC. The recommended waiting period is two months for those who received the single-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine.
Statewide, almost 28 million Californians are already fully vaccinated, according to data from the California Department of Public Health. But only about 13.8 million of them have so far gotten a booster.
Significant gaps also persist across age groups. Among Californians who are at least 65 years old, 72.3% of eligible people have already been boosted. The share is lower, 62.1%, for those between the ages of 50 and 64.
However, fewer than half of eligible adults ages 18 to 49 have been boosted so far. And the same is true for only abut 30% of those between the ages of 12 and 17, state data show.
Health officials say dramatically increasing booster coverage as well as getting more people to roll up their sleeves for the first or second time is key to reducing not just an individuals risk of becoming seriously ill with COVID-19, but the dangers posed by potential new surges.
The work that lies ahead will be focused on the kids who have only recently become eligible, or who remain ineligible for vaccines, to get them fully vaccinated, up-to-date on their immunity also on boosters, with a particular focus on our older, disabled, immunocompromised citizens, with a focus on closing yet another emerging equity gap in the current administration of boosters, Dr. Mark Ghaly, Californias health and human services secretary, said during a recent briefing.
According to the latest available state data, unvaccinated Californians remain almost six times more likely to be infected by the coronavirus than those who have been fully vaccinated and boosted. Theyre also nearly 12 times more likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 and 17 times more likely to die from the disease than their fully vaccinated and boosted counterparts.
Being fully vaccinated provides really excellent protection against COVID-19. But because the vaccines protection fades over time, people do need that booster dose to be optimally protected, said Los Angeles County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer.
Ongoing concerns about the potential for future surges is one reason why some California elected officials have voiced support for COVID-19 vaccination requirements.
A group of Democratic lawmakers is pushing a bill that would require employees and independent contractors to be vaccinated as a condition of employment unless they have an exemption based on a medical condition, disability or religious beliefs.
And last October, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced a plan to require COVID-19 vaccinations for all public and private schoolchildren. That would initially take effect for grades 7 through 12 for the school term following the U.S. Food and Drug Administrations full approval of the vaccine for children ages 12 to 15.
Children of that age can currently receive the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine under emergency authorization, but it isnt clear when the FDA might give its full approval. The vaccine has been fully approved by the FDA for those 16 and older.
Unlike with other vaccines required for schoolchildren, Newsoms plan because it was not enacted through the Legislature would allow parents to cite personal beliefs in refusing to inoculate their children against COVID-19.
There are efforts underway to strengthen that pending requirement. One legislator, state Sen. Richard Pan (D-Sacramento), has proposed a bill that would add COVID-19 vaccines to Californias list of required inoculations for attending K-12 schools, which can be skipped only if a student receives a rare medical exemption.
If passed by the Legislature and signed by the governor, the measure would supplant Newsoms plan.
In an interview broadcast on MSNBCs The Sunday Show with Jonathan Capehart, Newsom touted the states handling of the pandemic as one that has saved lives.
State health officials have published data showing how Californias cumulative per capita COVID-19 death rate is lower than the nations five other most populous states: Texas, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania and Illinois.
Newsom said now is the time to prepare for new surges should they come, such as making sure the state is not caught unprepared yet again with shortages of medical equipment like gowns and N95 masks.
Were realizing that were going to have to live with different variants of this disease for many, many years, Newsom said on the program.
Comparison of Experimental Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus Infection Acquired by Three Individual Routes of Infection in the Common Marmoset | Journal of Virology Journal of Virology
Tags: COVID-19
This past week, we announced that its time for Utahs response to the coronavirus pandemic to shift to better match where we are.
By March 31, our response will transition to what we are calling a Steady State. Some elements of the response will transition to being the responsibility of our highly capable health care systems. This will allow our public health system to refocus on things a public health system would normally look after, like disease surveillance, data collection and reporting, vaccinations, and public awareness. If we see another surge, we will maintain teams and contracts that allow for ramping back up quickly if necessary.
Heres what this means for you.
Testing sites across the state will close as we transition away from community sites to health care settings, private providers for events and travel and at-home testing.
We still recommend certain people seek testing, including older people with high-risk conditions, vulnerable populations and those who work with them and those who often visit vulnerable people. These Utahns should seek testing through their health care provider.
Similar to testing, health care and treatments will become more fully based in the health care system. Monoclonal antibody treatments are available in hospitals and urgent cares statewide. Health care providers across the state are now able to prescribe oral antivirals.
State contracts for COVID positive long-term care facilities are drawing to a close and we are demobilizing UDOH treatment sites. Public health will, however, continue to support navigating vulnerable populations to care.
Utah will continue to provide public information, but less often. We will be decreasing dashboard update frequency from daily to weekly.
We know this isnt over and will continue watching the data closely, tracking wastewater, clinic and ER visits, hospitalizations, and deaths. Were also keeping an eye on new variants or any increase in cases and will ramp back up if needed.
Vaccines have been and will be the surest way out of the pandemic. This administration is dedicated to getting vaccines to as many people as possible.
That includes vaccinations for children younger than five as soon as they are authorized. Weve made great strides in preparing for this: At least 79% of the states health care providers who participate in the Vaccines for Children program are also now enrolled to administer COVID vaccines. We will continue to work with the remaining 21% of providers to convince them to offer COVID vaccines to their patients as well.
We know that vaccination remains the best way to protect yourself from the coronavirus. Please help out our community by getting vaccinated today!
This is not the end of the pandemic. Were still keeping an eye on the future and are ready to ramp back up if necessary. But weve made great strides in fighting the pandemic:
In the past two years, weve
All of the key metrics are moving in the right direction. Vaccines are widely available and hopefully soon everyone older than six months will be eligible to receive the vaccine. Treatments are more widely available, and supplies are improving every week. Testing is available in the comfort of your own home! Hospitals and ICUs and the health care workers who staff them are still at high levels, as they trail behind other indicators, but they too are finally starting to see some relief.
As always, you can find coronavirus information at coronavirus.utah.gov and health.utah.gov.
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Population Immunity and Covid-19 Severity with Omicron Variant in South Africa | NEJM nejm.org
By Apoorva Mandavilli, The New York Times
For more than a year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has collected data on hospitalizations for COVID-19 in the United States and broken it down by age, race and vaccination status. But it has not made most of the information public.
When the CDC published the first significant data two weeks ago on the effectiveness of boosters in adults younger than 65, it left out the numbers for a huge portion of that population: 18- to 49-year-olds, the group the data showed was least likely to benefit from extra shots, because the first two doses already left them well-protected.
The agency recently debuted a dashboard of wastewater data on its website that will be updated daily and might provide early signals of an oncoming surge of COVID-19 cases. Some states and localities had been sharing wastewater information with the agency since the start of the pandemic, but it had never before released those findings.
Two full years into the pandemic, the agency leading the countrys response to the public health emergency has published only a tiny fraction of the data it has collected, several people familiar with the data said.
Much of the withheld information could help state and local health officials better target their efforts to bring the virus under control. Detailed, timely data on hospitalizations by age and race would help health officials identify and help the populations at highest risk. Information on hospitalizations and death by age and vaccination status would have helped inform whether healthy adults needed booster shots. And wastewater surveillance across the nation would spot outbreaks and emerging variants early.
Without the booster data for 18- to 49-year-olds, the outside experts whom federal health agencies look to for advice had to rely on numbers from Israel to make their recommendations on the shots.
Kristen Nordlund, a spokesperson for the CDC, said the agency has been slow to release the different streams of data because basically, at the end of the day, its not yet ready for prime time. She said the agencys priority when gathering any data is to ensure that its accurate and actionable.
Another reason is fear that the information might be misinterpreted, Nordlund said.
Dr. Daniel Jernigan, the agencys deputy director for public health science and surveillance said the pandemic exposed the fact that data systems at the CDC, and at the state levels, are outmoded and not up to handling large volumes of data. CDC scientists are trying to modernize the systems, he said.
We want better, faster data that can lead to decision making and actions at all levels of public health, that can help us eliminate the lag in data that has held us back, he added.
The CDC also has multiple bureaucratic divisions that must sign off on important publications, and its officials must alert the Department of Health and Human Services which oversees the agency and the White House of their plans. The agency often shares data with states and partners before making data public. Those steps can add delays.
The CDC is a political organization as much as it is a public health organization, said Samuel Scarpino, managing director of pathogen surveillance at the Rockefeller Foundations Pandemic Prevention Institute. The steps that it takes to get something like this released are often well outside of the control of many of the scientists that work at the CDC.
The performance of vaccines and boosters, particularly in younger adults, is among the most glaring omissions in data the CDC has made public.
Last year, the agency repeatedly came under fire for not tracking so-called breakthrough infections in vaccinated Americans, and focusing only on individuals who became ill enough to be hospitalized or die. The agency presented that information as risk comparisons with unvaccinated adults, rather than provide timely snapshots of hospitalized patients stratified by age, sex, race and vaccination status.
But the CDC has been routinely collecting information since the COVID-19 vaccines were first rolled out last year, according to a federal official familiar with the effort. The agency has been reluctant to make those figures public, the official said, because they might be misinterpreted as the vaccines being ineffective.
Nordlund confirmed that as one of the reasons. Another reason, she said, is that the data represents only 10% of the population of the U.S. But the CDC has relied on the same level of sampling to track influenza for years.
Some outside public health experts were stunned to hear that information exists.
We have been begging for that sort of granularity of data for two years, said Jessica Malaty Rivera, a public health researcher and part of the team that ran the COVID Tracking Project, an independent effort that compiled data on the pandemic until March 2021.
A detailed analysis, she said, builds public trust, and it paints a much clearer picture of whats actually going on.
Concern about the misinterpretation of hospitalization data broken down by vaccination status is not unique to the CDC. On Thursday, public health officials in Scotland said they would stop releasing data on COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths by vaccination status because of similar fears that the figures would be misrepresented by anti-vaccine groups.
But the experts dismissed the potential misuse or misinterpretation of data as an acceptable reason for not releasing it.
We are at a much greater risk of misinterpreting the data with data vacuums, than sharing the data with proper science, communication and caveats, Rivera said.
When the delta variant caused an outbreak in Massachusetts last summer, the fact that three-quarters of those infected were vaccinated led people to mistakenly conclude that the vaccines were powerless against the virus validating the CDCs concerns.
But that could have been avoided if the agency had educated the public from the start that as more people are vaccinated, the percentage of vaccinated people who are infected or hospitalized would also rise, public health experts said.
Tell the truth, present the data, said Dr. Paul Offit, a vaccine expert and adviser to the Food and Drug Administration. I have to believe that there is a way to explain these things so people can understand it.
Knowing which groups of people were being hospitalized in the U.S., which other conditions those patients may have had and how vaccines changed the picture over time would have been invaluable, Offit said.
Relying on Israeli data to make booster recommendations for Americans was less than ideal, Offit noted. Israel defines severe disease differently than the U.S., among other factors.
Theres no reason that they should be better at collecting and putting forth data than we were, Offit said of Israeli scientists. The CDC is the principal epidemiological agency in this country, and so you would like to think the data came from them.
It has also been difficult to find CDC data on the proportion of children hospitalized for COVID-19 who have other medical conditions, said Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Infectious Diseases.
The academys staff asked their partners at the CDC for that information on a call in December, according to a spokesperson for the AAP, and were told it was unavailable.
Nordlund pointed to data on the agencys website that includes this information, and to multiple published reports on pediatric hospitalizations with information on children who have other health conditions.
The pediatrics academy has repeatedly asked the CDC for an estimate on the contagiousness of a person infected with the coronavirus five days after symptoms begin but Maldonado finally got the answer from an article in The New York Times in December.
Theyve known this for over a year and a half, right, and they havent told us, she said. I mean, you cant find out anything from them.
Experts in wastewater analysis were more understanding of the CDCs slow pace of making that data public. The CDC has been building the wastewater system since September 2020, and the capacity to present the data over the past few months, Nordlund said. In the meantime, the CDCs state partners have had access to the data, she said.
Despite the cautious preparation, the CDC released the wastewater data a week later than planned. The COVID Data Tracker is updated only on Thursdays, and the day before the original release date, the scientists who manage the tracker realized they needed more time to integrate the data.
It wasnt because the data wasnt ready, it was because the systems and how it physically displayed on the page wasnt working the way that they wanted it to, Nordlund said.
The CDC has received more than $1 billion to modernize its systems, which may help pick up the pace, Nordlund said. Were working on that, she said.
The agencys public dashboard now has data from 31 states. Eight of those states, including Utah, began sending their figures to the CDC in the fall of 2020. Some relied on scientists volunteering their expertise; others paid private companies. But many others, such as Mississippi, New Mexico and North Dakota, have yet to begin tracking wastewater.
Utahs fledgling program in April 2020 has now grown to cover 88% of the states population, with samples being collected twice a week, according to Nathan LaCross, who manages Utahs wastewater surveillance program.
Wastewater data reflects the presence of the virus in an entire community, so it is not plagued by the privacy concerns attached to medical information that would normally complicate data release, experts said.
There are a bunch of very important and substantive legal and ethical challenges that dont exist for wastewater data, Scarpino said. That lowered bar should certainly mean that data could flow faster.
Tracking wastewater can help identify areas experiencing a high burden of cases early, LaCross said. That allows officials to better allocate resources like mobile testing teams and testing sites.
Wastewater is also a much faster and more reliable barometer of the spread of the virus than the number of cases or positive tests. Well before the nation became aware of the delta variant, for example, scientists who track wastewater had seen its rise and alerted the CDC, Scarpino said. They did so in early May, just before the agency famously said vaccinated people could take off their masks.
Even now, the agency is relying on a technique that captures the amount of virus, but not the different variants in the mix, said Mariana Matus, CEO of BioBot Analytics, which specializes in wastewater analysis. That will make it difficult for the agency to spot and respond to outbreaks of new variants in a timely manner, she said.
It gets really exhausting when you see the private sector working faster than the premier public health agency of the world, Rivera said.
This article originally appeared inThe New York Times.
