Provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will suspend daily counting of new coronavirus infections (COVID-19) starting on the 20th. The plan is to reduce the burden on health agencies in each state by switching from daily counting to weekly counting. It is the same form as the current flu monitoring system.
The CDC described the move as “to allow for additional reporting flexibility, to reduce the reporting burden on states and jurisdictions, and to maximize surveillance resources.” The reporting deadline for each week is every Wednesday at 10:00 am local time.
Analysts say that this measure has reached another milestone in the COVID-19 pandemic. The CDC also suspended travel alerts related to COVID-19 on the 3rd (local time). The reason is that fewer and fewer countries are testing for COVID-19 infection or reporting confirmed cases. Vaccination status surveys were also stopped last summer.
Health experts in the United States are criticizing the set of measures. The shift to weekly reporting is a byproduct of decades of lack of funding for public health systems, and that stopping daily COVID-19 surveillance could delay efforts to contain the spread of the epidemic and send the wrong message to the public.
Jodie Guest, a professor at Emory University’s School of Public Health in the US, told USA Today, “This action has to do with relieving the workforce problem and the burden on the state to update data on a regular basis. said.
Professor Guest also added, “System shifts can impede rapid response to fatal surges or new mutations, especially in winter, when the number of infections increases.”