The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has launched a new way for Americans to look up how high or low levels of viruses like COVID-19 and flu are in their local area for 2024. This year's new "community snapshot" is the CDC's latest attempt to repackage its data in one place for Americans deciding when to take extra precautions recommended in its guidelines , like masking or testing , going into the fall and winter. It centers around a sweeping new weekly metric called "acute respiratory illness.
" The metric's debut fulfills a goal laid out by agency officials months ago, aiming to measure the risk of COVID-19 alongside other germs that spread through the air on a single scale from "minimal" to "very high." "The biggest thing we're trying to do here is not just to have a dashboard . It's not just putting a bunch of information in front of people and kind of expecting them to navigate all of that," the CDC's Captain Matthew Ritchey told CBS News.
Ritchey, who co-leads the team that coordinates data fed into the snapshots, said the CDC gathers experts from across the agency every Thursday to walk through the week's data coming from hospitals and emergency rooms, wastewater sampling and testing laboratories. "All those groups come together, talking through their different data systems and their expertise to say, 'this is what's catching my eye.' And then that's what we want to tee up for the public," he said.
Ritchey cited early signs of respiratory syncytial virus , or.