Many COVID-19 trackers are shutting down in light of the general public health emergency ending in May. But experts are frightened that the closing of trackers might negatively impact pandemic management.
Generally, COVID trackers detail information just like the variety of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths in addition to state-wise or district-wise distribution of cases.
The tip of COVID trackers is worrying for experts as about 500 Americans are dying every day from the disease even today, as per ABCNews.
Considered one of the primary trackers to point out real-time COVID data, John Hopkins University reported their Coronavirus Resource Center shall be shut down in early March. The positioning was extremely resourceful as even the White House checked out its data in the course of the pandemic onset to gauge the extent of the pandemic abroad, in line with Dr. Blythe Adamson CEO and founding father of infectious economics and former member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force.
“Clearly the challenges, especially on the earliest outset of a pandemic, was that there was probably not good data infrastructure to report aggregate data, like case counts. The Johns Hopkins tracker played an actual vital role in filling in a few of those gaps,” John Brownstein, chief innovation officer at Boston Kid’s Hospital, said.
The tracker managed by the Department of Health and Human Services is closing as well. As an alternative, the dashboard run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shall be favored.
COVID data has proved to be a useful gizmo for public health officials and policymakers in informing COVID policies.
“The investments that took place in COVID should extend out to other public health crises and I feel that has all the time been a worry, that post-response we might be left with a graveyard of software code that might principally be never utilized and that might be such a shame,” Brownstein said.
The rollout of home test kits has now made case numbers less reliable. Nevertheless, officials still prompt people to anonymously report cases to MakeMyTestCount.org, a site led by the NIH.
“For infectious diseases, it’s extremely vital for public health agencies – I’m really referring to state and native health departments and CDC – to constantly monitor what number of persons are getting sick, who’s getting sick, and in fact to judge the pathogen itself,” Dr. Jay Varma, director of the Cornell Center for Pandemic Prevention and Response, said, in line with the outlet.
Speaking of COVID-19, a recent study has found ‘ severe’ structural changes within the brain in long COVID patients.
“Our results suggest a severe pattern of changes in how the brain communicates in addition to its structure, mainly in individuals with anxiety and depression with long COVID syndrome, which affects so many individuals,” Clarissa Yasuda of the University of Campinas in São Paulo, Brazil, said in a press release.