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Analysis: How Covid data gaps in states allowed Delta to proliferate
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When new Covid-19 infections and hospitalizations began soaring in Louisiana in July, state health officials were struggling with data gaps that blinded them to the full threat of the Delta variant.
The first three Covid-19 waves had overwhelmed Louisiana’s health department, one of the best resourced and most respected in the country. This summer, the state was one of the first swamped by Delta. As that fourth wave built, Louisiana was still battling many of the same challenges it faced during earlier surges. Labs struggled to process tests quickly and reported results to the state by snail mail, hampering Louisiana’s ability to contain the virus — problems created in part by decades of underfunding by the federal government.
Data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that Delta was quickly becoming the most dominant strain nationwide. But Louisiana’s efforts to track virus variants through genomic sequencing were still sparse, and the results often took more than a week to arrive. And neither the state nor the federal government had tracked Delta cases closely enough to know how easily fully vaccinated people infected with the variant could spread it, or whether Delta caused more severe disease than earlier strains.
Eighteen months into the pandemic, Louisiana and more than 20 other states are still trying to fill key gaps in data while fighting the most aggressive version yet of the virus. With new cases continuing to snowball, schools reopening and the holidays still to come, state health officials are bracing for a rough fall — and the possibility that a new, even more dangerous variant could emerge in the coming months. ...
Contact tracing efforts have dwindled in Louisiana and across the country over the last year, under a crush of cases and staff shortages. Thousands of labs are still not sending in test results electronically, slowing health departments’ surveillance operations — a catastrophic delay in the face of Delta, which is two to three times more contagious than the original version of the coronavirus.
Health officials in at least 20 states told POLITICO their data systems and the patchwork surveillance process were never going to hold up against Delta. ...
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