How to Solve the Covid Testing Data Problem

For the first time, we’re heading into a Covid winter mostly free of restrictions. People are tired of mandates and rules, tired of lining up for tests and even, as booster rates show, tired of getting shots. And so public health needs a new approach to do any good — one based not on restrictions and mandates and more on providing useful tools and information.

It’s not just fatigue that’s setting in, but something else — we’re no longer being advised to hold off on normal life for just a few more months, as many did until vaccines, until delta subsided, until the first and second omicron waves receded. At a recent symposium hosted by Harvard Medical School, biologists tracking the Covid pandemic forecast a long purgatory — the situation is much better than in 2020, but there’s no end in sight for the stream of new variants that keep evolving ways to evade immunity.