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The CDC is cutting daily COVID-19 reporting — as pressure mounts on U.S. officials to leave it behind after President Joe Biden declared it last month.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced the move Thursday, saying it would increase reporting flexibility.
It will take effect on October 20. The agency will instead start reporting weekly cases and death totals.
Reporting at the state and county level has already been scaled back significantly — with states like Florida and Nebraska dropping daily numbers in early 2021.
Only Arkansas, New Jersey and New York still report daily figures on the number of cases and deaths.
The move comes as interest in the pandemic is waning across America and leaders are beginning to express that it is time to move forward with the virus.
Daily Covid cases have also shrunk in recent months and an expected summer surge with BA.5 variants never materialized.
President Joe Biden declared the pandemic over in a TV interview last month — though he quickly backtracked on the claim after sharp criticism.
dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s leading infectious disease expert, said the US was out of the pandemic phase by April — though he later retracted that claim as well.
President Joe Biden (pictured) told 60 Minutes last month that the pandemic was over, though he quickly backtracked on the claims
Daily COVID-19 numbers have fallen sharply in recent months and an expected BA.5-driven summer surge never materialized
“To allow for additional reporting flexibility, reduce the reporting burden on states and jurisdictions, and maximize surveillance resources, CDC is transitioning to a weekly reporting frequency for line-level and aggregated data on cases and deaths,” the agency said of the decision.
The long-awaited move comes months after many states chose to roll back daily reporting in an effort to conserve resources.
Florida and Nebraska were among the first to drop daily reporting in the spring of 2021, deciding that periodic updates would suffice.
After the Omicron variant-driven wave of winter subsided, many states chose to drop daily reporting and spend resources elsewhere.
The CDC move is coming relatively late, with only three states still reporting cases.
The scaling back of daily reporting across the country has led to inaccurate and obscure reporting trends in recent months.
Daily case numbers on Monday and Wednesday were often significantly more than other days of the week due to different reporting schedules across America.
Weekend numbers also became almost useless with only minimal data making its way into official numbers on those days.
Last month, President Biden said the COVID-19 pandemic was over during a 60-minute interview with CBS.
“The pandemic is over,” he said.
“We still have a problem with COVID. We are still working on it. But the pandemic is over.
‘If you notice that no one wears masks. Everyone seems to be in pretty good shape, so I think it’s changing.”
He would come back to the comments days later at a donors’ event to the Democratic Party, saying he meant to say the pandemic has slowed down.
dr. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Disease, said during an interview with PBS News Hour.
“We are definitely out of the pandemic phase in this country now,” the country’s chief medical officer said.
‘We don’t have 900,000 new infections a day and tens and tens and tens of thousands of hospitalizations and thousands of deaths. We are now at a low ebb.
“So, if you say we’re out of the pandemic phase in this country, we are. What we hope to do, I don’t believe – and I’ve talked a lot about this – we’re not going to eradicate this virus.”
Americans’ concern about the pandemic is also bottoming out.
A New York Times poll published in late August found that only 20 percent of Americans view the virus as a major personal risk to them.
This includes a sharp drop among “very liberal” Americans – the group that is likely to be concerned.
Only about 35 percent were still concerned about the risk posed by the virus, compared to just under 50 percent in March 2022.
Americans’ lack of concern about the virus comes after a relatively Covid-free summer — following devastating seasons of warm weather in the previous two years.
The US currently records 43,149 daily infections, a 23 percent drop in the past two weeks.
Deaths have also stabilized at 391 a day – an eight percent drop in 14 days.
The BA.5 variant, believed to be the most permeable version of the virus, so far accounts for 81 percent of Covid cases sequenced in the US, the CDC reports.