Many COVID-19 trackers are shutting down in light of the public health emergency ending in May. But experts are worried that the closing of trackers might negatively impact pandemic management.

Generally, COVID trackers detail information like the number of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths as well as state-wise or district-wise distribution of cases.

The end of COVID trackers is worrying for experts as about 500 Americans are dying each day from the disease even today, as per ABCNews.

One of the first trackers to show real-time COVID data, John Hopkins University reported their Coronavirus Resource Center will be shut down in early March. The site was extremely resourceful as even the White House looked at its data during the pandemic onset to gauge the extent of the pandemic abroad, according to Dr. Blythe Adamson CEO and founder of infectious economics and former member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force.

“Clearly the challenges, especially at the earliest outset of a pandemic, was that there was not really good data infrastructure to report aggregate data, like case counts. The Johns Hopkins tracker played a real vital role in filling in some of those gaps,” John Brownstein, chief innovation officer at Boston Children's Hospital, said.

The tracker managed by the Department of Health and Human Services is closing as well. In its place, the dashboard run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will be favored.

COVID data has proved to be a useful tool for public health officials and policymakers in informing COVID policies.

“The investments that took place in COVID should extend out to other public health crises and I think that has always been a worry, that post-response we'd be left with a graveyard of software code that would basically be never utilized and that would be such a shame,” Brownstein said.

The rollout of home test kits has now made case numbers less reliable. Nevertheless, officials still prompt people to anonymously report cases to MakeMyTestCount.org, a site led by the NIH.

“For infectious diseases, it's very important for public health agencies – I'm really referring to state and local health departments and CDC – to continuously monitor how many people are getting sick, who is getting sick, and of course to evaluate the pathogen itself,” Dr. Jay Varma, director of the Cornell Center for Pandemic Prevention and Response, said, according to the outlet.

Speaking of COVID-19, a new study has found ‘ severe’ structural changes in the brain in long COVID patients.

“Our results suggest a severe pattern of changes in how the brain communicates as well as its structure, mainly in people with anxiety and depression with long COVID syndrome, which affects so many people,” Clarissa Yasuda of the University of Campinas in São Paulo, Brazil, said in a press release.