End of COVID emergency highlights U.S. weakness in tracking outbreaks: Washington Post

NEW YORK, May 10 (Xinhua) -- When the COVID-19 public health emergency ends May 11, laboratories across the United States will no longer be required to report coronavirus test results to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), reported The Washington Post on Tuesday.

Hospitals and state health departments, too, will report less comprehensive data, "making it more difficult for the federal agency responsible for detecting and responding to public health threats to protect Americans," said the report.

"The winding down of the (Joe) Biden administration's coronavirus response and accompanying changes to reporting requirements highlight long-standing vulnerabilities of a fractured public health surveillance system, one that fails to provide reliable information in disease outbreaks -- even as experts warn of the potential for the coronavirus to come roaring back," it noted.

"What we have right now is not a national public health system," Nirav Shah, the CDC's principal deputy director, was quoted as saying. "We have a patchwork. And as a result of that, when we want to get data and synthesize it, it takes a lot of legwork that takes way too long."

The coronavirus pandemic showed how critical real-time public health surveillance is for a basic understanding of outbreaks, such as how many people are sick or dying, whether a situation is getting better or worse, and which demographic groups are hardest hit, said Tom Inglesby, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, who co-wrote a report on how to improve the CDC's operations and pandemic response.