New Round of CDC’s COVID Guidelines Face First Test

measure of success may be harder to come by. Karen Landman, Senior reporter for Health and Science at Vox, joins us for more. Thanks for joining us, Karen, thanks so much for having the Oscar well. The COVID pandemic is still ongoing, although there's been a lot of changes Recently. We saw a huge wave and we dip back down. We're starting to see some case numbers take back up again, some hospitalizations take back up a little bit, although at a

much slower pace than before. We're looking at this macrons sub variant that's taken hold right now, but right now. The article that you wrote about recently was about the test for the CDCs guidelines, the changes that they made in February to see if they work. You know, we for a long time, all the numbers that we're using, we're basically going off of positivity rates and cases of COVID. Now we're moving to something that's looking more at hospitalizations

to see the burden on the healthcare system. So we've made some changes. We'll see if the numbers work and if guidelines keep up with all that. So Karen tell us a little bit more about it. Yeah, So that change that you're talking about, that shift from focusing on k counts and tests to focusing on hospitalization a sort of the main way of understanding the current threat level

from COVID in the United States. A grost people in public health saw that as a really necessary move on the part of the CDC, and that is because you know, we just have so much home based testing happening now that if we follow just you know, the results of PCR tests, we're really flying blind. So we just needed to use different data to understand what's going on right now.

At the same time, you know, there's hospitalization data is not perfect because hospitalizations usually follow rises in cases by anywhere from to two or more weeks, and it really depends on the whole variety of other things that are sort of going on with a variant and with transmission and with hospitals themselves. So it's not a perfect way of assessing their current threat level, but it is the best way that CDC and that many others really can

come up with. It doesn't mean that locations, you know, that individual health departments can't use other methods for assessing and responding to what they think is their current local threat level. And we see that, you know, Philadelphia, for example, kind of did their own thing this week. They reinstated a MASK mandate even though they're sort of local metrics hadn't met the CDC definition of meaning to do that. So CDC only makes recommendations, they don't issue requirements to

the local health department. So it certainly doesn't preclude local health departments from doing what they think is best for their municipality. And it's just guidance. And even on the federal level, right, we extended the MASK mandates for travel. I believe that goes until May three, so the guidelines are always kind of changing on that. And to your point about home testing, right, more people are testing at home. Nobody is required to submit that anywhere, and a lot

of people probably don't. They say, oh, I'm sick, I'm just gonna say home for a few days and back to it when you get better. You know, all those PCR tests before were reported back, so the at least with those case counts, that number was a lot more accurate. Now it's we can't really clean much off of those numbers. And so the new format now has kind of this color coded thing, you know for communities low, medium, and high.

How does that work? How do we anticipate what's going to be happening with those the low medium, high for a green, yellow, and red or orange are meant to basically help both people and institutions and public health departments

figure out where their county stands right now. And this has base fund a model that they used deaths as the endpoint, so they basically tried to figure out how early or what level they needed to see hospitalization, you know, what threshold they needed to see hospitals hospital as they sat to reach in order to allow public health authorities and individuals about three weeks time to take action in

order to prevent deaths from rising. So it's purposefully the alarms are set really low, at really low threshold so that they're triggered really early on to allow time to implement prevention strategies. So what we've seen over the last week, maybe a little bit more than a week, is very slowly. A few areas on the map have become have gone for being green to being yellow, and a few have converted even to being read. So you know, we are seeing a little bit of a bump in alarm going

off throughout the country. As you wrote in the article too, this is going to be as we keep progressing right now, it will be a test of the CDC's new guidelines of failure. Will obviously be able to see if people are getting sick and there's a whole new wave and hospitals are overwhelmed, you know, we're going to know the tactics didn't work so well. But measuring success is a lot more difficult. I mean, we have to define what

that success is too. But you know, who knows if we can attribute to the CDC or if everybody has just gotten sick enough that they're not getting as sick, the severe illness isn't cropping up as much, right So I think that is one possibility basically that effectively, this won't even really be a test of the CDC guidelines. If this big big, if then be a two waves as small. That doesn't mean that we won't have a

future variant wave that does test the CDC guidelines. But you know, there is a possibility just because we had so much omicron explosure during the b A one way, there's a possibility that there aren't that many susceptible people still left out there anymore. A modeling study back and a couple of months ago, I think showed around the estimate of folks in the United States who had immunity

either from exception or from vaccination. So I think there's still a possibility that there are lots of people out there who could get thick enough to really test this, but also a possibility that there aren't. But that's not the only way that this could be a difficult time to assess whether these guidelines are succeeding. Yeah, it's definitely.

It does seem like we're in this other phase of the pandemic now, and at least for the CDC definitely trying to move away from eliminating transmission of the virus. It just seems like we can't get that into control. But reducing debts and hospitalizations, the strain on the health care system, that's what these new guidelines are aiming to do. Karen Landman, Senior reporter for health and Science at Vox,

thank you very much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me after a take care, I'm Oscar Ramirez and this has been reopening America. Don't forget that. For today's big news stories, you can check me out on the Daily Dive podcast every money through Friday, so follow us in I Heart radio or wherever you get your pot gas