States Scale Back Pandemic Reporting, Causing Concern Among Experts

As the pandemic calms in the U.S., a growing number of states have started scaling back how often they update their dashboards tracking what's happening with the virus.

The moves are sparking alarm among many public health experts.

"One of the most troubling trends recently has been that states are making the decision to either slow or wind down their reporting efforts," says Beth Blauer, who helps run the Coronavirus Resource Center at Johns Hopkins University, a leading source of information about the pandemic.

"I think it's absolutely appropriate for us to celebrate the progress we've made, but we still are very much navigating a pandemic. We haven't gotten to the point where we can stake victory," Blauer says.

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At least two dozen states that have stopped updating daily the number of people catching the virus, being hospitalized and dying, according to Johns Hopkins. Some stopped reporting anything over weekends. Others cut back to just a few times a week. Florida is the latest state to go to just once a week — Oklahoma is another one that has reduced to once a week reporting.

State officials are defending the changes, which they say allow public health workers to focus limited resources where they are needed most, such as improving the quality of the data and boosting vaccinations.

"As our cases were trending downwards and our vaccination rates were increasing, it made more sense for us to go to weekly reporting for certain things," says Jolianne Stone, the Oklahoma Department of Health's epidemiologist. "We still do have a pulse of what is going with COVID here in Oklahoma. And I feel very confident in that."

But Blauer and others worry that cutting back on daily reporting could leave those states in the dark about new outbreaks until it's too late, especially in where vaccinations remain very low. ...