A late-summer COVID surge is adding even more stress to an already busy time of year.
Next week, undervaccinated kids will return to New York City classrooms without many of the precautions that marked previous pandemic-era school years. And the city health commissioner warned this week that the new BA.2.86 variant has arrived and may be more likely to sidestep people’s pre-existing immunity, making people vulnerable to reinfection.
It’s also hard to know exactly how bad the surge will be. Because of changes in how officials and clinics test for and track the virus, old data standbys — cases, test positivity and community transmission levels — don’t mean as much as they once did.
“It really is hard to look at cases and conclude much beyond whether community transmission is on the rise or not,” said Denis Nash, an epidemiology professor at the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health. “It doesn’t really help us quantify what really is a surge.”
So what’s a COVID-conscious New Yorker to do this fall? Nash and another expert suggested consulting more robust measures of COVID transmission, like hospitalizations and the concentration of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus in sewage samples. (Gothamist has retooled its own COVID stats page to reflect this advice. You can check it out here.)
Testing trends
The number of COVID cases reported by the New York City Department of Health used to be the barometer for community transmission. Case counts and case rates led city, state and federal data dashboards in the early years of the pandemic. But the popularity of at-home tests has made those metrics less and less reliable, said Dr. Wafaa El-Sadr, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and principal investigator at the city’s Pandemic Response Institute.
“We can watch the numbers of cases, but we have to keep in mind that those are largely undercounting,” she said.
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