ANAHEIM, Calif. — California is scaling back how often it publicly reports coronavirus case, death, testing and other numbers on the health department website, and some counties are following suit — to mixed reaction from public health experts.
As of this week, California will update those numbers only on Tuesdays and Fridays, rather than every weekday. Twice a week is one of the lowest frequencies of any state in the U.S., according to Johns Hopkins University, which tracks coronavirus stats from around the world.
Riverside County already has switched to the same Tuesday/Friday schedule. Orange County plans to reduce its frequency as well, probably by next week, Health Care Agency Director of Communications Julie MacDonald said via email.
San Bernardino County is considering doing the same.
“The County could resort to pulling, processing, and vetting raw data from the State database to continue daily updates, but doing so would be labor-intensive, costly to the taxpayers, and seemingly of little value as the numbers are currently changing very little day-to-day,” spokesperson David Wert wrote in an email. “In the event of a sustained caseload surge, the State would likely pivot back to daily updates and the County could easily do so as well.”
Los Angeles County just recently stopped updating on weekends — a change many other counties made long ago — and officials said they have no plans to scale down to less than five days a week.
Why change now?
As a California Department of Public Health spokesperson explained in an email: “We have learned over the course of this pandemic that it is more helpful to look at data trends over time and that public health recommendations should be based on consistent trends rather than day-over day changes.”
Those trends show that the number of cases diagnosed per day, which has been dropping steadily since January, appears to be plateauing at the second-lowest level since the pandemic began; the only lower period was in April-June 2021. Also, COVID-19 hospitalization levels are getting close to the spring 2021 lows.
The state’s change in reporting “dovetails with the state’s SMARTER approach where we use multiple prongs of surveillance to maintain awareness of COVID-19 trends, including wastewater surveillance, which is not as subject to the evolving changes in testing patterns and behaviors,” the spokesperson wrote.
Wendy Hetherington, Riverside County’s chief epidemiologist, noted that the county tried scaling down once before — it switched to weekly reporting in June 2021 when case levels were low and the state was leaving behind its color-coded tiers. Orange County did the same, but by mid-July both were back to five-day-a-week updates as the delta surge began.
This time, Hetherington said, they’re watching the data closely — she said test-positivity rates and hospitalizations tend to be a better indicator than case rates these days — to determine whether the omicron BA.2 subvariant causes another wave. If it does, she said, Riverside County can resume more frequent updates.
In the meantime, she said, not having to put the daily reports together saves her staff a lot of time, allowing them to focus on higher-level analysis of the data.
Mixed reaction
Brandon Brown, who is an associate professor of public health at the University of California, Riverside and has a background in epidemiology, was sympathetic to the decision to scale back.
“Public health departments are absolutely overworked and under-resourced,” he said in an email. He said he could understand not wanting to spend so much time on updates as long as case levels are low.
While Brown said he might have waited a couple more weeks until spring break travel is over, “I think it’s OK to scale back updates since that doesn’t mean that data are no longer collected or that prevention methods come to a halt.”
UC Irvine epidemiologist Andrew Noymer, however, believes the timing is wrong from a messaging standpoint.
“It’s not exactly the hill I want to die on, as long as updates are released regularly and accurately,” he said.
But he’s worried the nation is on the cusp of another wave from the BA.2 variant — cases are rising in the Northeast U.S., and some California counties are showing upticks as well.
“It sends a message that it’s less important than it was before, and I don’t believe it is,” Noymer said.
According to Johns Hopkins University, California joins 12 other states that report COVID-19 case data twice or less per week. Twenty-five states report five days a week, while only seven states are still reporting every day.
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