CDC scraps travel health notices as countries slow testing, and study confirms Republican-leaning counties suffered more COVID deaths than Democrat-leaning ones. Photo: Nathan Howard/Getty Images

The reason: Fewer countries are testing for the virus or reporting the number of COVID cases. That limits the CDC’s ability to calculate travelers’ risk, according to the agency.

CDC spokeswoman Kristen Nordlund said the agency will only post a travel health notice for an individual country if a situation such as a troubling new variant of the virus changes CDC travel recommendations for that country.

The CDC still recommends that travelers remain up-to-date on vaccines and follow recommendations found on its international travel page.

A new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research has confirmed that political affiliations played a key role as a risk factor for dying of COVID, finding evidence that Republican-leaning counties suffered higher death rates than Democratic-leaning ones.

“We estimate substantially higher excess death rates for registered Republicans when compared to registered Democrats, with almost all of the difference concentrated in the period after vaccines were widely available in our study states,” the authors, Jacob Wallace and Jason L. Schwartz of the Yale School of Public Health, and Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham of the Yale School of Management wrote.

“Overall, the excess death rate for Republicans was 5.4 percentage points (pp), or 76%, higher than the excess death rate for Democrats.”

The researchers used data from Ohio and Florida and matched 2017 voter registration data with mortality data from 2018 to 2021. They also found a link between political affiliation and views on vaccines, with Republican-leaning counties showing far lower vaccination rates.

In the US, known cases of COVID are continuing to ease and now stand at their lowest level since late April, although the true tally is likely higher given how many people are testing at home, where the data are not being collected.

The daily average for new cases stood at 45,495 on Monday, according to a New York Times tracker, down 24% from two weeks ago. Cases are rising in 11 states plus Washington, D.C. They are up by double-digit percentages in Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Vermont.

The daily average for hospitalisations was down 11% at 27,854, while the daily average for deaths is down 12% to 386.