Why Does the CDC Keep Screwing Up?

The agency changed its isolation guidelines, for instance, after politicians and industries expressed fears about the economic fallout of the more transmissible omicron variant. When the metrics for community risk changed, it similarly seemed to prioritize politics over health. “What they were trying to do was to provide receipts for a number of jurisdictions making those policy changes,” Rivera said. Changing the community risk metrics, in other words, offered state and local officials a rationale for changes they already wanted to make despite case counts remaining high.

These changes had a pretty big effect on public perception of the pandemic, said Dr. Jason Salemi, an associate professor of epidemiology at the University of South Florida College of Public Health. “CDC is obviously a relatively trusted source, although it’s been politicized during the pandemic. But people pay a lot of attention,” he told me. “People are paying attention to this map, which has just been bleeding red across the entire United States for much of December, January, and February. And then within one day, they see this transition.” Suddenly, many counties with high transmission were now ranked as low risk. The CDC, for its part, put out a guidance document explaining the changes—but that filtered down to few people in the public.

“This is a tool—one of the tools that the public can use and people can use to gauge risk,” Salemi said. “But it has always been imperfect, the data are imperfect, and there are so many other indicators that are being collected and reported that hopefully enough people are paying attention to all of the indicators in every community, all of the information that is accessible to them, to again get out in front of any sort of surge that emerges.” He worries, though, that when another variant emerges, people will be slow to take up precautions again—especially if they mistakenly believe they’re safe now.