The Vermont Department of Health has stopped including data on Covid-19 cases and deaths in its weekly surveillance reports.
The department posted on its website on Feb. 19 that Covid data reporting would transition to “to a format similar to other respiratory viruses like the flu.”
The latest surveillance update contains data on emergency department visits for Covid, the proportion of variants from clinical specimens, Covid levels in wastewater sampling and a count of the latest outbreaks.
Emergency department and wastewater data suggest that Covid levels are on the decline from a relative surge in December and January.
The department said on its website that case data has become “a less meaningful” indicator of Covid trends as individual cases have been reported on a limited basis by health care settings and laboratories. Officials have warned that case data, based on PCR testing, has been less accurate since the widespread adoption of antigen testing in 2022. The department stopped publishing daily Covid case counts in 2023.
“Reporting of individual SARS-CoV-2 infections to public health has become increasingly sporadic as testing patterns have changed (including widespread use of at-home testing),” state epidemiologist Patsy Kelso wrote in an email when asked if there was a specific justification for the more recent shift.
A higher proportion of Covid infections now tend to be asymptomatic, Kelso said, meaning they were less likely to require health care intervention that would result in a Covid PCR test.
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Data on individual test results is no longer being analyzed at the federal level or published in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Covid tracker, a change made in 2023. The disease is still reportable on a state level, meaning health care providers, laboratories and certain other officials are required to report positive cases to the health department, according to Kelso.
When it comes to Covid deaths, the department said it stopped releasing death data because Covid has shifted from being the underlying cause of Covid-associated deaths to only a contributing cause.
When asked for more details on that shift, Kelso said 87% of deaths associated with Covid in Vermont had the disease as an underlying cause early in the pandemic, compared with 55% during the Omicron wave. Omicron has been the dominant strain of the Covid-19 virus in Vermont since early 2022.
The final surveillance update with death data, released Feb. 12, reported that 1,258 Vermonters had died from Covid since the beginning of the pandemic, including 16 in January. The CDC continues to publish provisional mortality statistics, including for Covid, on a national basis in its database. It’s unclear what data will be published on Covid deaths from Vermont through the CDC.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont stops publishing Covid-19 death and case data.