COVID could be surging in the U.S. and we might not even know it

Testing and viral sequencing are critical to responding quickly to new outbreaks of Covid. And yet, as the country tries to move on from the pandemic, demand for lab-based testing has declined and federal funding priorities have shifted. The change has forced some testing centers to shutter while others have hiked up prices in response to the end of government-subsidized testing programs. People are increasingly relying on at-home rapid tests if they decide to test at all. But those results are rarely reported, giving public health officials little insight into how widespread the virus truly is…

According to the CDC, the majority of the country is still considered low risk. Public health experts argue this is misleading though, given hospitalization and death generally occur days to weeks after initial infection. Without widespread testing, that could make it impossible to detect a surge until it’s too late to do anything about it.

“CDC is understating and downplaying cases,” said Gregg Gonsalves, an infectious disease expert at Yale’s School of Public Health. “Their alarm bells won’t go off until we see a rise in hospitalizations and deaths, which are lagging indicators.”