Breakthrough infections aren’t our only data blind spot at the moment. Recently, a number of states, including Nebraska and Florida, stopped reporting daily tallies of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths, and moved to weekly reporting instead. (As the AP’s Josh Funk writes, Nebraska briefly stopped all of its data reporting after the governor declared an end to the state’s health emergency, only to backtrack.)
“Doing this weekly report just leaves you completely in the dark about what’s going on,” Cindy Prins, an epidemiologist at the University of Florida, told the Tampa Bay Times. “And then on Friday, all of a sudden, like, boom, you get this surprise number.”
Nationally, daily COVID testing rates—which were arguably never high enough to provide a truly accurate picture of the state of the pandemic in the US—have declined substantially from their peak. Data collection and reporting can be labor-intensive, and it’s legitimate, of course, to debate where stretched health bureaucracies should direct their resources for maximum benefit in this new phase of the pandemic—but as I’ve written before, from a journalist’s point of view, the more data we have, the more reliable the picture of the world that we can build.
Meanwhile, there’s still a lot we don’t fully understand about the science of the virus, with new variants, in particular, proving confounding. “It’s a bit maddening, because it felt like we got to a point where we got to know this virus a little bit,” Mandavilli said yesterday on The Daily. “Delta has really changed that entire calculation. There are just so many more questions than I think we expected to have at this point. And it feels a little bit like an inflection point—another one—where the country could go in either direction.”
I agree. In fact, I’d make the case that this stage of the pandemic is the most complicated and uncertain that America has yet faced—not the worst, by any means, but perhaps the hardest for people, and the media, to get their heads around. The problems that bedeviled our early coverage of the pandemic—a lack of scientific certainty and consensus; inadequate data flows—are still problems, in ways new and infuriatingly unchanged. And the mitigation measures we had to cover back then—while never the beneficiaries of political consensus—were relatively blunt compared to the more subjective and situational risk calculations of this moment, which still very much apply, even as cases rise again. The vaccines are magnificent, but we still don’t know everything about them.
The situation differs substantially by place, and it can be hard to easily compare them. And it’s arguably more urgent than ever that Americans look out on the world, large swathes of which are desperately struggling right now.
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