Still, even in New York things look vastly different than during the start of prior surges. Gone are the days of long testing lines and sold out antigen tests. And all over the country, pop-up testing centers, once a pandemic mainstay, are starting to disappear. Though state-run testing facilities have continued to operate in some regions, people without health insurance are facing high prices. And as of March 22, the  U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration is no longer accepting reimbursement claims from health providers for Covid testing either.

At the same time, at-home rapid testing has increased. The problem is, the CDC does not require people to report positive at-home test results so it’s rare the results of at-home tests are factored into public health data.

“We are probably underestimating the number of infections we are having now because many of the infections are either without symptoms or minimally symptomatic and you will miss people that do it at home,” Anthony Fauci, the top medical adviser to President Joe Biden, told Bloomberg TV on Wednesday.

Daily Covid Diagnostic Test Volume | Tests sequenced by labs in the U.S. and reported to the CDC
In New Jersey, for example, Stacy Flanagan, the director of health and human services for Jersey City, said that in the last three months she’s had just two people call to report positive at-home tests. Cases are continuing apace in the city with an average of 64 new cases per day, according to health department data.  That’s almost double the number of daily cases reported a month ago.

“We’ve heard from only a handful of conscientious people who call us and say, ‘I’ve done a home test and it’s positive,’” said Dave Henry, the health officer for more than a dozen towns in Monmouth County, New Jersey.

Public health experts are left to piece together data from a variety of sources. For Rick Bright, a virologist and CEO of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Pandemic Prevention Institute, that means using the CDC data as well as a number of other sources to understand Covid’s spread. “Unfortunately, we still have to go to a handful of sites to try to patch together what's really happening across the country.”

Other metrics such as wastewater surveillance and even air sampling may eventually become helpful alternatives in understanding how much virus is circulating in a community. For weeks, sewer data has shown cases are increasing in some regions of the U.S. — foreshadowing the uptick in positives that places like New York and Massachusetts are now seeing.

In the nation’s capital, more than 50 people who attended the elite Gridiron Club dinner on April 2 have tested positive for the coronavirus, the Washington Post reported — at least 8 percent of those who attended. The list of the infected includes the U.S. attorney general, Commerce secretary, aides to Vice President Kamala Harris and first lady Jill Biden, and the sister of the president.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who didn’t attend the dinner, has also tested positive, raising concern about time she spent in proximity to President Biden prior to her diagnosis.

Home Testing
The White House maintains there’s enough data about Covid in circulation to catch the next surge. Tom Inglesby, senior policy advisor for Biden’s Covid-19 Response Team, said the CDC gets 850,000 lab-based test results every day, which he believes is sufficient to detect trends in the positivity rate and variant prevalence.