As the federal emergency ends for the COVID-19 pandemic, public health departments plan to stop collecting and reporting case data and focus on hospitalizations, deaths and wastewater surveillance.
Santa Barbara County stopped reporting detailed case data last year (it previously reported cases with breakdowns by geographic area, age group and other demographics), and COVID-19 data dashboards have been updated less and less frequently.
The county Public Health Department said Thursday it plans to share available data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the California Department of Public Health, but the end of emergency declarations means agencies will be “transitioning their COVID publicly available data.”
The CDC will focus on COVID-19-positive hospitalizations, deaths, genetic sequencing/variant surveillance, and wastewater surveillance, according to the county. It also will conduct vaccination studies and long COVID studies.
CDPH will report on hospitalizations, deaths, emergency department visits and test positivity.
“There will be a two- to six-week pause starting May 11 for California hospitalization data to allow a transition in how data is collected and analyzed,” Santa Barbara County Public Health posted on its COVID-19 data dashboard this week. “Case data will no longer be available, as this data has become less meaningful due to at-home antigen testing.”
Local public health officials say that hospitalization and wastewater surveillance data are the most valuable for tracking COVID-19 right now anyway, since so many people use at-home tests (making PCR-confirmed test reports an undercount of all the people currently infected).
“COVID is clearly still with us, but the nice thing is it seems to have stabilized without causing these massive surges,” said Dr. Lynn Fitzgibbons, an infectious disease physician at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital. “It’s with us, but again, not causing nearly the disruption it was before.”
As of Wednesday, there were seven COVID-19-positive patients in local hospitals.
Earlier in the pandemic, epidemiologists and others relied on new cases, test positivity (the percentage of test results that were positive) and COVID-19-positive hospitalizations to track the level of community transmission of the novel coronavirus.
The huge increase in at-home, rapid antigen testing made the first two metrics less helpful for overall tracking, since most people don’t report their positive home test results to public health agencies.
In the three-plus years of the COVID-19 pandemic to date, 770 Santa Barbara County residents have died of related causes and more than 113,000 positive cases have been reported (which, again, is an undercount).
About 70% of county residents are fully vaccinated — which is 317,859 people — and 60.2% of people also have received at least one booster shot.
Noozhawk ended its weekly COVID-19 newsletter last month.
