As large-scale interventions against COVID-19 are long gone, officials and experts continue to preach the importance of individual decision making in assessing and managing health risks.

However, tracking the status of the coronavirus has become increasingly difficult as data collection and reporting have either been reduced or stopped altogether in the post-emergency phase.

Part of that is by design. The collective experience with coronavirus has allowed some incomplete indicators, such as officially reported cases, to be replaced in favor of others, such as sewage monitoring, which can give a clearer picture of the circulation of the virus in the community.

But declining data is making it harder to assess the trajectory of the virus in specific areas, as well as making it harder for people to adjust their attitudes and behaviors — a potentially worrisome development for those who remain at the highest risk of serious illness.

And the public knowledge gap could widen in the coming months as metrics collection becomes increasingly decentralized after the COVID-19 public health emergency ends, and more residents lose access to resources like free testing.

“Now it will be a little harder to track down. Over the past few months, this has already become more of a challenge as states and localities have begun to reduce the frequency of their reports,” the doctor said. Mario Ramirez, ER physician and managing director of Opportunity Labs, a nonprofit research and consulting firm.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has made several efforts to pack the terms of the pandemic into digestible pieces, including the release of the agency’s COVID-19 community level map in February 2022.

What counties sorted by system across the country into one of three categories—low, medium, or high—depending on incidence rates and certain rates of hospitalization. For each category, the CDC has issued specific guidance on measures such as wearing masks, testing, and avoiding crowds.

However, officials on Thursday abandoned the system. Due in part to case count restrictions that are becoming increasingly unreliable due to the prevalence of home testing, officials also acknowledged the growing difficulty of providing a snapshot on site. . Many states and counties have stopped collecting or sharing data about COVID-19.

On Thursday, the CDC’s COVID data tracker stopped reporting cumulative cases and removed data on positive test results. The old tracker listed weekly COVID-19 deaths; new version says percentage of COVID-related deaths among all reported deathsbased on preliminary death certificate data to indicate the trend in COVID mortality.

The tracker’s leading data point was the number of people who first admitted to hospital with a lab-confirmed coronavirus infection in the previous week.

Hospitalization data is offered down to the district level, with districts sorted into one of three levels: green, yellow, or orange. Much of the country is now on the green, with fewer than 10 coronavirus-positive hospital admissions per week for every 100,000 residents. The worst level, orange, is when the bet is 20 or more.

On Thursday, Los Angeles County reported 2.8 coronavirus-positive hospital admissions for every 100,000 residents.

V weekly trend of coronavirus hospitalizations available for each state on the CDC website. In the week ending May 6, California reported 1,284 coronavirus-positive hospitalizations, the lowest since last spring’s lull.

The all-time low for this indicator was 870 for the week ending April 16, 2022. The all-time peak of 16,663 occurred in the week ending January 9, 2021, at the height of California’s deadliest wave of COVID-19. At the time, Los Angeles hospital mortuaries were so overcrowded that the National Guard was called in to temporarily store the bodies.

While coronavirus-positive hospitalization rates are vital in illustrating the pressure COVID-19 is putting on hospitals, some experts point out that they only provide a limited view of transmission.

“It will be much broader strokes than the predictive analytics we have become accustomed to over the past few years,” Ramirez said on Tuesday. during the panel hosted by the COVID-19 Vaccine Education and Equity Project. “And so I’m worried that by the time the data comes back, it’s usually two, three, four weeks old, especially because hospitalization is a lagging indicator, and of course, death. We will be weeks behind the increase in cases, if that is what is happening.”

This is not to say that hospital-focused metrics are out of place. According to the California Department of Public Health, hospitalization rates for COVID-19 patients “showed a 99 percent match” with population levels.

“We are studying how our data collection and reporting will change after the end of the federal emergency and will keep the public informed of any changes that may occur,” the department said in a statement to The Times.

California currently publishes weekly data on cases and deaths from COVID-19 on its website. online panel and also monitors the number of patients with coronavirus hospitalized throughout the state. This information is available at COVID19.ca.gov/state-dashboard.

Los Angeles County releases case and death data weekly every Thursday. Officials also report an average percentage of coronavirus-related emergency room visits, and the rate has remained stable at around 3% over the past month. In late March and early April, this figure was 4%.

Appreciating the county’s progress, Director of Public Health Barbara Ferrer noted that “every day, thousands of people in Los Angeles County continue to suffer from COVID-19, whether they are forced to miss work due to illness, need in hospital or are in critical condition. effects of prolonged COVID.

“[The Department of] Public health remains committed to work that reduces the likelihood of transmission and ensures the county is prepared for the possibility of periodic changes in transmission,” she said Thursday. “We continue our work to make sure there are no barriers to those who want to access life-saving vaccines, therapeutics and tests.”

The state also supports model – CalCAT, California Infectious Disease Assessment Tool – for a rough estimate of the extent of coronavirus transmission. This tool uses the available data to arrive at an estimated effective reproductive rate, which shows how many people, on average, an infected person transmits the coronavirus.

However, this model is also not immune to changes in the availability of pandemic data.

“Overall, case rates, including R-effective, are less reliable in the face of changes in testing regimens, including increased use of home/antigen testing versus PCR-confirmed testing,” state health officials wrote in response to an earlier request from the Times. . .

However, they added that “because R-effective represents the rate of change, it can still be useful for identifying trends in COVID-19, especially when combined with hospitalization data.”

For example: The latest statewide R-efficiency score was 1.06, indicating that the spread of COVID-19 is likely to be stable. Accordingly, the number of hospitalized patients with coronavirus across the state has decreased since the beginning of the month – from 1,282 on May 1 to 1,182 on Wednesday.

Another key focus both during the pandemic and in the future is wastewater surveillance. Officials say this provides a more complete picture of how widespread the virus is in a given area than testing alone, and could help identify and track any potentially worrying mutations.

In California, the Department of Public Health expects “wastewater monitoring to become a regular part of public health surveillance for COVID-19” and “plays a potential role in monitoring other pathogens of public health importance, such as smallpox and influenza.”

“At the local health department level, wastewater surveillance can also add useful localized information to health systems, institutions, or campuses that need to track COVID-19 or other diseases of public health importance,” the department wrote in a statement last week. .

Updated data from the State Wastewater Surveillance Network Cal-SuWers. regularly online.

The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health also regularly reports wastewater data in its reports. weekly news releases. District on Thursday informed its levels were only 11% of last winter’s peak, according to the most recent data available.

And last week, San Francisco International Airport announced that it had become the first airport in the country start off CDC’s program to monitor wastewater samples from international flights.

However, whatever the current extent of the coronavirus, officials say there are a few things residents can do to protect themselves.

“Even though COVID emergencies are ending, the virus is still with us,” the state health department said in a statement. “It’s important for Californians to continue using the tools we have to fight COVID, including vaccines, testing, and treatments.”