Speaker 1: It's Friday, April. I'm Oscar Ramires from the Daily Dive
Speaker 1: podcast in Los Angeles, and this is Reopening America. The
Speaker 1: CDC's latest round of COVID guidelines are facing their first test.
Speaker 1: The guidelines now reflect a shift in priorities. They're moving
Speaker 1: away from trying to eliminate the transmission of the virus
Speaker 1: to reducing debts and strain on the healthcare system. We
Speaker 1: will know if the guidelines fail right away, but a
Speaker 1: measure of success may be harder to come by. Karen Landman,
Speaker 1: Senior reporter for Health and Science at Vox, joins us
Speaker 1: for more. Thanks for joining us, Karen, thanks so much
Speaker 1: for having the Oscar well. The COVID pandemic is still ongoing,
Speaker 1: although there's been a lot of changes Recently. We saw
Speaker 1: a huge wave and we dip back down. We're starting
Speaker 1: to see some case numbers take back up again, some
Speaker 1: hospitalizations take back up a little bit, although at a
Speaker 1: much slower pace than before. We're looking at this macrons
Speaker 1: sub variant that's taken hold right now, but right now.
Speaker 1: The article that you wrote about recently was about the
Speaker 1: test for the CDCs guidelines, the changes that they made
Speaker 1: in February to see if they work. You know, we
Speaker 1: for a long time, all the numbers that we're using,
Speaker 1: we're basically going off of positivity rates and cases of COVID.
Speaker 1: Now we're moving to something that's looking more at hospitalizations
Speaker 1: to see the burden on the healthcare system. So we've
Speaker 1: made some changes. We'll see if the numbers work and
Speaker 1: if guidelines keep up with all that. So Karen tell
Speaker 1: us a little bit more about it. Yeah, So that
Speaker 1: change that you're talking about, that shift from focusing on
Speaker 1: k counts and tests to focusing on hospitalization a sort
Speaker 1: of the main way of understanding the current threat level
Speaker 1: from COVID in the United States. A grost people in
Speaker 1: public health saw that as a really necessary move on
Speaker 1: the part of the CDC, and that is because you know,
Speaker 1: we just have so much home based testing happening now
Speaker 1: that if we follow just you know, the results of
Speaker 1: PCR tests, we're really flying blind. So we just needed
Speaker 1: to use different data to understand what's going on right now.
Speaker 1: At the same time, you know, there's hospitalization data is
Speaker 1: not perfect because hospitalizations usually follow rises in cases by
Speaker 1: anywhere from to two or more weeks, and it really
Speaker 1: depends on the whole variety of other things that are
Speaker 1: sort of going on with a variant and with transmission
Speaker 1: and with hospitals themselves. So it's not a perfect way
Speaker 1: of assessing their current threat level, but it is the
Speaker 1: best way that CDC and that many others really can
Speaker 1: come up with. It doesn't mean that locations, you know,
Speaker 1: that individual health departments can't use other methods for assessing
Speaker 1: and responding to what they think is their current local
Speaker 1: threat level. And we see that, you know, Philadelphia, for example,
Speaker 1: kind of did their own thing this week. They reinstated
Speaker 1: a MASK mandate even though they're sort of local metrics
Speaker 1: hadn't met the CDC definition of meaning to do that.
Speaker 1: So CDC only makes recommendations, they don't issue requirements to
Speaker 1: the local health department. So it certainly doesn't preclude local
Speaker 1: health departments from doing what they think is best for
Speaker 1: their municipality. And it's just guidance. And even on the
Speaker 1: federal level, right, we extended the MASK mandates for travel.
Speaker 1: I believe that goes until May three, so the guidelines
Speaker 1: are always kind of changing on that. And to your
Speaker 1: point about home testing, right, more people are testing at home.
Speaker 1: Nobody is required to submit that anywhere, and a lot
Speaker 1: of people probably don't. They say, oh, I'm sick, I'm
Speaker 1: just gonna say home for a few days and back
Speaker 1: to it when you get better. You know, all those
Speaker 1: PCR tests before were reported back, so the at least
Speaker 1: with those case counts, that number was a lot more accurate.
Speaker 1: Now it's we can't really clean much off of those numbers.
Speaker 1: And so the new format now has kind of this
Speaker 1: color coded thing, you know for communities low, medium, and high.
Speaker 1: How does that work? How do we anticipate what's going
Speaker 1: to be happening with those the low medium, high for
Speaker 1: a green, yellow, and red or orange are meant to
Speaker 1: basically help both people and institutions and public health departments
Speaker 1: figure out where their county stands right now. And this
Speaker 1: has base fund a model that they used deaths as
Speaker 1: the endpoint, so they basically tried to figure out how
Speaker 1: early or what level they needed to see hospitalization, you know,
Speaker 1: what threshold they needed to see hospitals hospital as they
Speaker 1: sat to reach in order to allow public health authorities
Speaker 1: and individuals about three weeks time to take action in
Speaker 1: order to prevent deaths from rising. So it's purposefully the
Speaker 1: alarms are set really low, at really low threshold so
Speaker 1: that they're triggered really early on to allow time to
Speaker 1: implement prevention strategies. So what we've seen over the last week,
Speaker 1: maybe a little bit more than a week, is very slowly.
Speaker 1: A few areas on the map have become have gone
Speaker 1: for being green to being yellow, and a few have
Speaker 1: converted even to being read. So you know, we are
Speaker 1: seeing a little bit of a bump in alarm going
Speaker 1: off throughout the country. As you wrote in the article too,
Speaker 1: this is going to be as we keep progressing right now,
Speaker 1: it will be a test of the CDC's new guidelines
Speaker 1: of failure. Will obviously be able to see if people
Speaker 1: are getting sick and there's a whole new wave and
Speaker 1: hospitals are overwhelmed, you know, we're going to know the
Speaker 1: tactics didn't work so well. But measuring success is a
Speaker 1: lot more difficult. I mean, we have to define what
Speaker 1: that success is too. But you know, who knows if
Speaker 1: we can attribute to the CDC or if everybody has
Speaker 1: just gotten sick enough that they're not getting as sick,
Speaker 1: the severe illness isn't cropping up as much, right So
Speaker 1: I think that is one possibility basically that effectively, this
Speaker 1: won't even really be a test of the CDC guidelines.
Speaker 1: If this big big, if then be a two waves
Speaker 1: as small. That doesn't mean that we won't have a
Speaker 1: future variant wave that does test the CDC guidelines. But
Speaker 1: you know, there is a possibility just because we had
Speaker 1: so much omicron explosure during the b A one way,
Speaker 1: there's a possibility that there aren't that many susceptible people
Speaker 1: still left out there anymore. A modeling study back and
Speaker 1: a couple of months ago, I think showed around the
Speaker 1: estimate of folks in the United States who had immunity
Speaker 1: either from exception or from vaccination. So I think there's
Speaker 1: still a possibility that there are lots of people out
Speaker 1: there who could get thick enough to really test this,
Speaker 1: but also a possibility that there aren't. But that's not
Speaker 1: the only way that this could be a difficult time
Speaker 1: to assess whether these guidelines are succeeding. Yeah, it's definitely.
Speaker 1: It does seem like we're in this other phase of
Speaker 1: the pandemic now, and at least for the CDC definitely
Speaker 1: trying to move away from eliminating transmission of the virus.
Speaker 1: It just seems like we can't get that into control.
Speaker 1: But reducing debts and hospitalizations, the strain on the health
Speaker 1: care system, that's what these new guidelines are aiming to do.
Speaker 1: Karen Landman, Senior reporter for health and Science at Vox,
Speaker 1: thank you very much for joining us. Thank you so
Speaker 1: much for having me after a take care, I'm Oscar
Speaker 1: Ramirez and this has been reopening America. Don't forget that.
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