COVID-19 realtime outlook in US blurred

LOS ANGELES－As the BA.5 subvariant becomes dominant among new cases in the United States, reduced testing is blurring the real-time outlook of the COVID-19 pandemic, reported The New York Times on Tuesday.

As public testing sites run by state and local governments have dwindled, more US states have also stopped giving daily updates, creating a foggier look at the state of the virus across the country.

The reduction in public testing means that lab-based PCR testing capacity in July will be only half of what it was in March, said the report, citing a recent estimate by research and consulting firm Health Catalysts.

The report added that the vast majority of positive results from popular home test kits are not included in official data, and not everyone who gets infected knows or gets tested.

Many people in the US appear to be moving even further away from focusing on daily case counting as a measure of the nation's pandemic health. But other people with risk factors said they feel ignored and abandoned as their governments and neighbors have sought a return to normal, the report said.

The report also pointed out that some scientists estimate that the current wave of cases is the second largest of the pandemic.

As states report less frequently, changes in the trajectory of the virus are slower to reveal themselves. Nearly every state reported the number of new coronavirus cases, hospitalizations and deaths for five days a week or more in 2020 and 2021, but 23 states now release new data only once a week.

As of Sunday, more than 113,000 new coronavirus cases were being reported each day in the US, according to the report.

The fast-spreading BA.4 and BA.5 sub-lineages of Omicron are estimated to make up a combined 70.1 percent of the coronavirus variants in the US as of July 2, according to statistics released by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday.

Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, was quoted by The New York Times as saying that "That's not really a reflection of the total amount of virus circulating in the communities."

He told the newspaper that his "back of the envelope" estimate was about 1 million cases per day.

Xinhua - Agencies