Covid-19 has settled into the ignoble cast of diseases considered native to New York, five years after the virus transformed the way of life in the city.
As the public health emergency waned, the virus has become a fixture more along the lines of the common flu than a mass killer, still sending people to the hospital but not nearly in the numbers seen at the pandemic’s peak. The Board of Health voted to amend the city’s health code on Wednesday to move Covid-19 from the list of diseases that must be immediately reported to those that must be reported within 24 hours, an important distinction in triggering a public health response.
The vote to recategorize the virus that set off a global pandemic and brought the city’s health system to its knees in 2020 is perhaps the most official local recognition to date that the disease has become endemic to New York, reflecting a characterization adopted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Covid-19 has so far been in the company of diseases considered to be an imminent threat to public health like Ebola, smallpox, measles and plague. It will now fall into the same category as more commonly occurring diseases like Lyme, strep, syphilis and tetanus that public health officials monitor as part of routine disease surveillance.
As part of the change, the city will no longer require providers to immediately report Covid cases to the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, which is used by the department to assist with provider diagnoses, infection control, contact tracing and isolation – the public health functions that served as the first line of defense against the virus when immunity was low and hospitals were overflowing at the height of the pandemic.
Those functions are no longer needed, according to the Board of Health, which oversees the city health code. The virus has not gone away: in the winter of 2023 to 2024, Covid-19 hospitalized an average of 150 residents per week, according to the Health Department. But that is significantly lower – less than 10% – of hospitalizations in April 2020.
Since then, the widespread availability of vaccines, testing and medication has significantly reduced the risk of hospitalization from the virus, bringing it closer to other endemic diseases like influenza and respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV.
The change will help alleviate the workload that comes with the stricter reporting requirements and align the city with state guidelines, said Health Department spokeswoman Chantal Gomez.
The change comes as city spending on communicable disease prevention has shrunk in the years since the pandemic. That spending has declined year over year since the height of the pandemic, dropping from approximately $276 million in fiscal year 2021 to just $85 million in 2024, budget documents show. Federal pandemic aid has also dried up, shrinking from at least hundreds of millions of dollars to the Health Department since the start of the pandemic.
