What will change, and what won’t, after COVID emergency ends

The expiration of federal COVID-19 emergency declarations on Thursday brings a slew of changes with potential effects on public health policy, food security, immigration and other areas of life.

But many changes might not be that noticeable. Much of what constitutes a public health emergency takes the form of bureaucratic changes within government, noted John’s Hopkins University infectious disease specialist Dr. Amesh Adalja.

“For the average person on the street, May 10 is not going to be very much different than May 11,” Adalja, an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told the Daily News.

Here is a breakdown of the major programs and policies that will change or go away.

In terms of federal public health policy, changes to our daily lives will depend in part on insurance coverage.

Testing

Insurance companies will no longer be mandated to provide free at-home COVID tests, though they might do so anyway. And free testing might not be available on every street corner.

“For Americans who have adequate health insurance, I think there probably won’t be much of an impact,” said Dr. Peter Hotez, co-director of Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, via the AAAS. “You’ll still have availability of diagnostic testing and diagnostic kits, as well as vaccines. I think the big greater unknown is what about the uninsured — or those who are underinsured.”

When it comes to keeping track of the disease itself, data collection methods will change. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will stop collecting hyper-local data on COVID infections within communities, though it will continue to monitor overall rates of hospitalization and death. COVID infection prevalence will be monitored on a broad-brush scale via wastewater analysis.

Deaths will be monitored the same way flu death rates are. Laboratories will no longer be required to report COVID test results. Paxlovid will be available gratis “while supplies last,” the CDC said last week.

Vaccine mandates

Vaccines and related mandates are governed by a hodgepodge of agencies, each with their own requirements and criteria. Many have been lifted already, especially in the private sector.

The end of the emergency does not affect the U.S. Federal Drug Administration (FDA) emergency authorization of vaccines, but it does officially lift the mandate for federal workers, federal contractors and foreign air travelers to the U.S. to be immunized. The elimination of mandates for Head Start educators, health care workers, and noncitizens crossing into the U.S. by land are not far behind.

“While I believe that these vaccine mandates had a tremendous beneficial impact, we are now at a point where we think that it makes a lot of sense to pull these requirements down,” White House COVID-19 coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha told The Associated Press last week.

Vaccine mandates are still in place for many employees at the National Institutes of Health, the Indian Health Service and the Department of Veterans Affairs, and those are being reviewed by the individual agencies.

Vaccine and treatment costs

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This is where patients could get pinched, as government funding gives way to the commercial market, Politico noted. Medicaid recipients will be able to get free treatment until Sept. 30, 2024, and seniors will still be eligible for vaccines under Medicare Part B. When it comes to vaccines for everyone else, the COVID shot falls under Affordable Care Act coverage requirements for preventative services. But there might still be some out-of-pocket costs.

The impact on food assistance programs “will be minimal” for most participants, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) says on its website. “But in some programs, it will trigger changes that impact low-income individuals and families.”

As of Thursday, homeless young adults aged 19-24 will no longer be eligible for emergency shelter under the Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP), the FNS said. Children who received the equivalent of school lunch funds while home-schooling during the pandemic will continue to be eligible through the end of the summer, the FNS said, but benefits for younger kids who were closed out of day care facilities during lockdown will end Thursday.

Other EBT changes will be eased in. “Able-bodied adults” with no dependents who receive benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) will have to once again meet the work requirement as of July 1. If they don’t get work by Oct. 1, they could lose those benefits.

Thursday also marks the end of Title 42, shorthand for a section of a 1944 public health law limiting migration if warranted to protect public health. The CDC invoked it in March 2020 for asylum seekers, ostensibly as a way to reduce the spread of COVID-19. Championed by the Trump administration, the order allowed Customs and Border Protection to boot migrants, including people seeking asylum, on grounds that the places they would be held in are not designed for social distancing or quarantine.

The CDC tried to suspend the rule last year after vaccines and treatments became widely available, but the U.S. Supreme Court upheld it. The Biden administration is preparing for an influx at the southern border, and Republicans have been pushing for new restrictions, including more border walls.

With News Wire Services