The most troubling news about the spread of COVID-19 comes from a recent CDC conference where 35 attendees came down with the virus. These people would appear to be part of a group that is eminently aware of the risks and the precautions that must be taken to avoid infection. But, they didn’t take precautions? Were they as worn out as the rest of us and wanted to be free to go to a “safe” conference?

Since 2018, the COVID-19 epidemic has affected people worldwide, and there have been hints recently that its spread might or might not be ending. As more people become immunized, disease rates decline, and restrictions are loosened, there is greater optimism than ever that this pandemic will end. But, some CDC members have run into heated arguments that have caused them to understand an alarming truth: It might never end.

Members of the CDC are becoming increasingly worried about the possibility that reduced vaccination rates in some areas would undercut the progress made in the fight against the flu and make it more difficult than originally anticipated to stop its spread.

The number of COVID-19 cases in India, brought on by the virus’s new variant strain, has increased alarmingly quickly, raising concerns throughout Southeast Asia and India, according to CDC experts and global health officials.

The Economic Times of May 1, 2023, indicated: “India on Monday reported 4,282 coronavirus infections, while the number of active cases dropped by over 1,750 to stand at 47,246, according to the latest Health Ministry data. The death toll has increased to 5,31,547 with 14 more fatalities, which includes six reconciled by Kerala, the data updated at 8 a.m. showed.”

In the face of the news coming out of India and, possibly being withheld in other countries, how can we say the pandemic is over and we no longer need to take precautions? The CDC has insisted that people who have received the flu shot are allowed to engage in a variety of activities without having to abide by specific rules, such as mask-wearing and physical distancing requirements. But people contract the virus despite immunization.

Although there are fewer cases and more people getting vaccinated, the difficulties CDC staff and public health professionals confront demonstrate that the H1N1 epidemic has not yet been defeated. How will the recent CDC ruling that one vaccine shot by a person coming into the US will be viewed as “fully vaccinated” now affect our citizens?

“Because some traveler vaccine records might not specify whether recent Moderna or Pfizer doses received were bivalent, CDC will consider anybody with record of a single dose of Moderna or Pfizer vaccine issued on or after August 16, 2022, to meet the requirements,” is the agency’s response.

Recent occurrences among CDC members demonstrate that the influenza pandemic is still running strong despite broad vaccination campaigns against the Delta subtype. More Delta cases must be immediately treated in order to combat the pandemic flu outbreak, as cases and hospitalizations may surge across the country.

Together, we can face this catastrophe head-on, but experts are showing concern that another pandemic may be on the horizon this coming fall and questioning whether or not current vaccines will be sufficiently robust to quell it and save lives. This doesn’t bode well for our continued health-related stress, and that may contribute to infection rates as well since we know stress has a tendency to lower our natural immunity anyway.

The post CDC Members Prove to Themselves the Pandemic Isn’t Over appeared first on Medika Life.

[This story also ran on The Daily Yonder.]

That effort pleased researchers and advocates for improving rural health because the dozen or so examinations of rural health data provided important details about the 46 million Americans who live away from the nation’s population centers. It began to fill a gap in the information used by those who study and address the issues that affect people in rural communities.

But those reports, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report rural health series, began and ended in 2017. And though the CDC has addressed rural health in other weekly reports and data briefs, the agency hasn’t examined it in such depth since.

That’s one reason rural health advocates successfully pushed for the CDC to extend its rural health focus by creating an Office of Rural Health at the agency. The office is operational as of March 2023, and advocates hope the agency will commit to rural health research and provide analyses that lead to good public health policies for rural communities.

“What we’re seeing is rural continually getting left behind,” said Alan Morgan, CEO of the National Rural Health Association, which urged Congress to fund the office. “They’re communities at risk, communities that may not be employing public health safety measures, and we are flying blind,” he said.

“What’s needed is an ongoing look at rural communities, their populations, to better direct both state and federal efforts to address health disparities,” he said.

The omnibus appropriations bill signed by President Joe Biden in December 2022 gave the CDC $5 million for the 2023 fiscal year to create the Office of Rural Health inside the agency, which has a $9.3 billion budget this year. Congress directed the CDC to sharpen its focus on public health in rural areas with the new office, after covid-19 had an outsize impact on rural America.

Though the CDC is a data-driven public health agency, it’s unlikely the new office will solve preexisting rural data challenges. But CDC officials have said in-depth rural health initiatives that require collaborations across the CDC — like the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report rural health series — could become more common practice at the agency.

“Instead of comparing rural and non-rural, it was looking within rural,” said Diane Hall, acting director of the office, about the 2017 reports. “That MMWR sort of laid out some things that we can be thinking about doing more of so that within rural variation, [there’s] better understanding of how race and ethnicity play out in rural communities.”

In addition to ethnic disparities, the series examined illicit drug use, causes of death, and suicide trends, among other things. Those topics are already part of what the CDC tracks, but typically the agency compares rural data for those topics with urban data rather than creating a stand-alone analysis.

Hall said having an Office of Rural Health will also help the CDC continue collaborating with the Federal Office of Rural Health Policy, part of the Health Resources and Services Administration. That office has existed since 1987 and has been the primary federal office dedicated to rural health care. But its focus is on increasing access to health care rather than monitoring public health.

At the CDC’s Office of Rural Health, “we’re more likely to be focusing on prevention,” Hall said.

What the office is unlikely to do, she said, is create new surveys and collect data that the CDC does not already track. It would be a “pretty costly” undertaking, she said. “I think what would be more impactful is to work with the people that are already doing that and help them better understand that rural context.”

Rural data analysis poses challenges because of the smaller size of rural population centers compared with the larger populations of urban areas. For instance, small communities might not have adequate response rates to surveys, which can limit the conclusions researchers can make about the data.

Michael Meit, co-director of the Center for Rural Health Research at East Tennessee State University, said the 2017 series helped to mitigate the “small numbers” challenge, wherein samples aren’t large enough to be properly analyzed because rural areas have smaller populations.

Each of the series’ reports outlined data limitations such as small numbers and their effect on the analysis, which shows the CDC was “already pushing forward and trying to bring voice to these issues,” Meit said. “I think that by itself is huge.”

Hall, the acting director, said there isn’t a simple solution to challenges like small sample sizes but that the “CDC’s Office of Rural Health can work to highlight creative solutions being developed, such as our PLACES project.” PLACES, or Population Level Analysis and Community Estimates, is a collaboration among the CDC, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and CDC Foundation that releases data for smaller cities and rural areas. (KFF Health News receives funding support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.)

Another challenge with rural health data is that small numbers can make it possible to identify who in a particular community is included in data. But the CDC has restrictions in place to prevent that from happening.

Sometimes, though, the agency does allow researchers to access files containing details like “race or ethnicity for small and highly visible groups” and “extreme values of income and age.”

Keith Mueller, director of the Rural Policy Research Institute, hopes the Office of Rural Health will make it easier for researchers to access that more detailed data.

“There would be somebody at the agency who can get at the data, who can help us answer the research question,” he said. “Collaborative work between people in the field and people in the agency who have the direct access to the data is far more readily available or likely to happen with this new office.”

Since the office is based in the CDC’s new Public Health Infrastructure Center, which launched in February, Hall said it’s well positioned to partner with researchers. The center manages the agency’s partnership grants, which are awarded to organizations that plan to improve public health services.

Hall said the office’s most immediate priorities, though, are to grow the staff beyond its current three members and to develop the CDC’s strategic plan for rural health.

The post The CDC Lacks a Rural Focus. Researchers Hope a Newly Funded Office Will Help appeared first on Medika Life.