ATLANTA — A recent change in how the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) tracks the COVID-19 pandemic is drawing criticism from a top doctor in Atlanta.
The Executive Director of the COVID-19 Task Force at Piedmont, Dr. Jayne Morgan, accused the CDC on Twitter of moving the goalposts on how it tracks the risk of COVID-19 in communities on Sunday.
Previously many tracked the risk of the virus by monitoring CDC's community transmission ratings of low, moderate, substantial or high on a color-coded map of blue, yellow, orange and red.
Under that system of community transmission metrics, much of Georgia would be considered to have moderate transmission or even high in a few counties.
Recently the CDC began to emphasize a new set of metrics labeled as community levels.
With the new metrics, almost all of Georgia is considered low risk. Even a large portion of the U.S. is in the green - or low risk, a change from the concerning yellow, orange and red.
"As we have more and more people and more and more immunity in the population we wanted to make sure that we were focusing on the severe disease because we do want to prevent severe disease, we want to prevent hospitalizations," CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky recently said during a late February press briefing where she was asked about the change. "We want to prevent our hospitals from becoming overwhelmed."
The CDC found community levels were better predictors of deaths and ICU patients than community transmission data.
According to the CDC, it considers community transmission is high when there are more than 100 new COVID-19 cases per 100,000 people over seven days, or test positivity rates are over 10 percent.
"What the CDC has done is lumped all four categories together, low, medium, substantial and high, and created this new category of low, which is actually higher than our highest caseload in the previous definition," Dr. Morgan said.
Community levels are high if there are 200 new cases per 100,000 people, ten new COVID hospitalizations per 100,000 people or 10-plus percent of hospital beds are filled with COVID patients.
Morgan said that the majority of the country would still be in the high-risk zone under previous metrics, not low. Parts of Georgia would be in the moderate range.
"It influences decisions we are going to make about our health and the health around us," Morgan said. "Interestingly, the CDC still has both maps up on their website."
The CDC now lists the community transmission map and data for "healthcare facility use only."