This Could Determine When COVID Restrictions Will End in Your Area

A growing number of European countries are starting to ease up on COVID restrictions (or ending them entirely), and Americans are taking notice. While case rates remain high in many E.U. countries, hospitalizations and deaths are not surging as they have previously—potentially indicating these countries are entering a more workable phase of the pandemic, The Guardian reports. Denmark is doing away with all pandemic restrictions, for instance, while the Netherlands, France, and Belgium are also lifting rules to varying degrees. England, where omicron is peaking, dropped public mask mandates and vaccine passports earlier this month. Naturally, many in the U.S. are wondering: When will COVID-19 restrictions end for us? 

Not as soon as many might hope, according to reporting from CNN seeking to answer that question. Some public health experts have expressed cautious optimism about the omicron wave cresting, as SELF has reported, and there are promising data trends. COVID-19 infections and hospital admissions are beginning to decline across the U.S. (overall, though not uniformly), according to the latest CDC data. For instance, new daily hospitalizations for the week ending January 25 are down 8.8% from the previous week, according to the CDC, while the seven-day moving average of daily new infections as of January 26 is down 19.9% from the previous week.

Other numbers are less encouraging. Deaths are still on the rise: The seven-day moving average of new deaths (2,288) for the week ending January 26 has increased 25.1% compared with the previous week. (For perspective, that number was 1,217 as of January 1, and 884 as of December 1, 2021, per the CDC.) 

Perhaps more important for predicting the rollback of COVID-19 restrictions is another COVID measure: community transmission, or the person-to-person spread of the virus in a given locality.

Community transmission (rated as low, moderate, substantial, or high) is calculated based on two indicators: the number of new cases per 100,000 people and the percentage of positive PCR tests over the past week. And it’s this data point that public health officials in many U.S. municipalities use to make decisions about easing or tightening restrictions, Lori Tremmel Freeman, CEO of the National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO), told CNN. Currently, community transmission is classified as “high” in 99.75% of U.S. counties, according to the CDC. 

“High” community transmission means there are 100 or more new cases per 100,000 people and/or a 10% or higher positive test rate, the CDC explains. “Low” community transmission means there are fewer than 10 new cases per 100,000 people and/or a positive test rate of less than 5%. (Moderate and substantial community transmission are somewhere in between.) Looking at the CDC‘s county-by-county map, you can see that all but six counties in the entire country are currently experiencing high transmission rates, coded as red. “The whole country is still red,” Freeman told CNN. “So we haven’t yet overcome this latest surge.”