REGIONAL- For those who still believe COVID is a threat to their health, information about the virus for the communities in which they live is increasingly harder to come by.
Recent developments in this arena come courtesy of the May 11 end of the federal coronavirus emergency and the funding and mandates that came with it.
One tool in the information toolbox that disappeared on May 11 is the COVIDaware MN phone app. People who came down with COVID and tested positive through a lab could enter a code into their phone, and phone tracking technology enabled the app to send notifications to app users telling them if they had been exposed through close contact with someone who had reported their COVID case. At-home testing diminished the effectiveness of the app, although those testing positive at home could request a code to enter. The funding for that national notification system ended May 11, and app users will no longer receive exposure notifications.
The app never collected personally identifying information, and any information entered about exposures was deleted after 14 days or when the app was deleted from a user’s phone.
Another casualty of the changing times is the CDC’s Community Levels indicator, which coded every county green, yellow, or red depending on the extent of COVID activity. But the levels indicator was fueled in part by case data, which has become increasingly unreliable as a predictor with the advent of home testing, and with the COVID emergency expiring the CDC lacks the authority to require states to submit some of the data that they had been previously.
Nonetheless, the CDC is confident it can keep a handle on monitoring COVID through other metrics, such as hospitalization rates, which have been shown to parallel case data in their ability to allow assessment of community COVID activity.
“There has been a 99 percent concordance between the community levels, which are being retired and the new hospital admission driven metrics,” CDC Principal Deputy Director Nirav Shah said May 5. “In short, we will still be able to tell that it’s snowing, even though we’re no longer counting every snowflake.”
For the moment, it appears the Minnesota Department of Health is standing pat with its weekly COVID Situation Update, which reports on case numbers, COVID variants, hospitalizations, mortality, vaccinations, vaccine breakthrough data, and specific settings data for child care, schools, higher education, and long-term and congregate care settings.
A reliable weekly source of information for the public has been a COVID update from MPR News, which has provided easy-to-grasp summaries based on state and some local data, but that has now been trimmed back to every other week as the severity of the pandemic has lessened.
In its report last Friday, MPR News reported that cases, hospitalizations and deaths all continue to decline, and the COVID viral load in northeast Minnesota is down by 56 percent over the last four weeks, although that measure increased by nine percent last week. According to the report, hospitalizations in St. Louis County from COVID are down to a rate of eight per week.