Three years ago ...

[edschweppe]

Three years ago today - Wednesday, March 11, 2020 - the World Health Organization declared the novel coronavirus to be a global pandemic:

GENEVA (AP) — The World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a pandemic and urged aggressive action from all countries to fight it, as U.S. stocks plunged into bear market territory and several American cities joined global counterparts in banning large gatherings.

By using the charged word "pandemic" after shying away from calling it so earlier, the U.N. health agency sought to shock lethargic countries into pulling out all the stops.

"We have called every day for countries to take urgent and aggressive action. We have rung the alarm bell loud and clear," WHO's chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Wednesday.

Today, three years later, there's no sign of the virus stopping:

On the third anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic, the virus is still spreading and the death toll is nearing 7 million worldwide. Yet most people have resumed their normal lives, thanks to a wall of immunity built from infections and vaccines.

The virus appears here to stay, along with the threat of a more dangerous version sweeping the planet.

"New variants emerging anywhere threaten us everywhere," said virus researcher Thomas Friedrich of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "Maybe that will help people to understand how connected we are."

With information sources drying up, it has become harder to keep tabs on the pandemic. Johns Hopkins University on Friday shut down its trusted tracker, which it started soon after the virus emerged in China and spread worldwide.

Saturday marks three years since the World Health Organization first called the outbreak a pandemic on March 11, 2020, and the United Nation's health organization says it's not yet ready to say the emergency has ended.

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On Friday, Johns Hopkins did its final update to its free coronavirus dashboard and hot-spot map with the death count standing at more than 6.8 million worldwide. Its government sources for real-time tallies had drastically declined. In the U.S., only New York, Arkansas and Puerto Rico still publish case and death counts daily.

"We rely so heavily on public data and it's just not there," said Beth Blauer, data lead for the project.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention still collects a variety of information from states, hospitals and testing labs, including cases, hospitalizations, deaths and what strains of the coronavirus are being detected. But for many counts, there's less data available now and it's been less timely.

"People have expected to receive data from us that we will no longer be able to produce," said the CDC's director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky.

Internationally, the WHO's tracking of COVID-19 relies on individual countries reporting. Global health officials have been voicing concern that their numbers severely underestimate what's actually happening and they do not have a true picture of the outbreak.

For more than year, CDC has been moving away from case counts and testing results, partly because of the rise in home tests that aren't reported. The agency focuses on hospitalizations, which are still reported daily, although that may change. Death reporting continues, though it has become less reliant on daily reports and more on death certificates — which can take days or weeks to come in.

U.S. officials say they are adjusting to the circumstances, and trying to move to a tracking system somewhat akin to how CDC monitors the flu.

The good news, locally, is that deaths and hospitalizations are continuing to trend downward from this winter's spike. Unfortunately, they're still far higher than the summer of 2021, when effective vaccines were pretty much available nationwide and before the delta variant took off. Today, while those vaccines still are providing strong protection against acute severe illness and death from COVID, there isn't anything to either prevent infection in the first place or prevent disabling long COVID. Which, frankly, stinks.