When the covid 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. 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.
The winding down of the Biden administration’s coronavirus response and accompanying changes to reporting requirementshighlight 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.
“What we have right now is not a national public health system,” said Nirav Shah, the CDC’s principal deputy director. “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.”