Is It Time to Stop Tracking COVID Infection Figures?

Recent increases in the number of new COVID infections make for some grim reading. The city of Tokyo saw an unprecedented 20,000 cases per day for two consecutive days, with no sign that the number of infections will decline. Japan as a whole recorded 3 million cumulative cases of infections, only two weeks after hitting 2 million. With much of the population not yet receiving the third shot of the vaccine, little is there to slow down Omicron and whatever other variants that COVID will evolve to next in its quest to continue dominating the daily lives of people around the world.

Yet, even as COVID figures hit a daily record every day, they no longer dominate news headlines. News of Russia's potential invasion of Ukraine, falling stock and cryptocurrency values in response to monetary tightening, as well as the usual gossip among celebrities, the rich, and the famous now make the world almost forget that the pandemic is still very much ravaging the world. And as the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics gets underway, it is expected that people will, like they did for the Tokyo Olympics last year, spend a few weeks cheering for sportspersons representing their countries.

Part of the fact that COVID has seemingly fallen to the background of people's daily lives may be the fact that people are more used to the idea of others (and themselves) getting infected, and in most cases, recovering. Yes, plenty of serious cases, deaths, and painful and persistent side effects still occur as a result of increasing infections, but the general public no longer hears about hospitals being overwhelmed and officials urging citizens to stay home as they privately panic about how best to come up with credible countermeasures that are also not economically damaging.

Indeed, newspapers are now openly questioning whether the few countries that stick to the so-called "zero COVID strategy," consisting of firmly shut international borders as well as frequent testing and lockdowns in response to the slightest uptick in infection figures, are wise to maintain the strategy at all. Locales that depend on a steady stream of international arrivals, whether as workers or tourists, are leaping to the conclusion that borders need to be completely open, soon if not now, for their economies to survive and thrive in the years to come. 

One obstacle for such a strategy to stick is the general public's reluctance, developed over the past two years of the pandemic, to see beyond the headline numbers of new infections. For those that still keep up with the current development in the pandemic, many still see first how many more people tested positive, rather than how many excess deaths are recorded or the changing rate of hospitalization from COVID. As such, continuing to publish the number of newly infected as a regular statistic risks confusing the public as countries move away from keeping infections in check.

Instead, countries can keep the public just as informed by releasing deaths and hospitalizations as headlining figures representing the current state of the pandemic. If the public sees that serious cases of COVID remain in the minority and stay relatively steady, they will become less concerned with how many people are infected in the first place. As much as some political leaders were criticized for comparing COVID to the seasonal flu, it may now be the time for statistical agencies to treat the reporting of COVID figures no different from that of endemic influenza.

Better yet, it might make sense for some countries to encourage news outlets to downplay COVID figures completely. Just as seasonal flu figures do not go beyond a couple of days in the news cycle every year, only to highlight the overall severity of the annual endemic, COVID figures can be written out more as an infrequent summary rather than a daily update. While keeping the public informed about the pandemic is important, it is also important to remind people that there are world events that could impact the direction of human civilization much more than a pandemic that will go away in a matter of years.

Still, governments need to be discreet in nudging the news of the pandemic further to the background of all that is happening in the world. The pandemic started with the world blaming China for censoring reports of an infection that is affecting a large number of people in a short time. Others cannot be seen as emulating China in how to tell the public about the pandemic. Only by balancing the ready availability of information with methods to actively encourage behavioral change among news outlets and their audience will ensure that people do not concern themselves too much with the pandemic without being irritated by what they perceive as a deliberate withholding of information.