The federal and state COVID-19 Public Health Emergency (PHE) declarations expired on May 11, 2023. While most CDPH COVID-19 surveillance activities are not directly affected by the end of the PHE, there have been some changes to data reporting and availability.

• CDC is no longer providing COVID-19 Transmission Levels and COVID-19 Community Levels for each U.S. county. CDPH is adopting COVID-19 Hospital Admission Levels to inform and guide prevention decisions. More information can be found on the CDC’s website.
• CDPH no longer directly receives hospital capacity data from Chicago hospitals. However, hospitals are still required to report information about COVID-19, including data on bed capacity, availability, and occupancy, to federal agencies. These data are used to calculate COVID-19 Hospital Admissions Levels by county.
• Changes to requirements for health insurance companies may impact access to testing for some in Chicago. Measures of severe illness, such as hospitalizations and deaths, are captured by CDPH more reliably. More representative testing metrics based on data collected from sentinel surveillance sites are shared in our Respiratory Virus Surveillance reports.

CDPH will continue to monitor multiple data sources to inform public health guidance and interventions, including expanded use of wastewater testing and genomic sequencing to supplement case reporting and enhance our understanding of how COVID-19 is spreading in our communities. CDPH will also continue to share data about COVID-19 activity in Chicago through our dashboard webpages and the Chicago Data Portal.