C.D.C. no longer recommends universal case investigation and contact tracing in the U.S.

Almost two years after the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention called for 100,000 contact tracers to contain the coronavirus, the C.D.C. said this week that it no longer recommends universal case investigation and contact tracing. Instead it encourages health departments to focus those practices on high-risk settings.

The turning point comes as the national outlook continues to improve rapidly, with new cases, hospitalizations and deaths all continuing to fall even as the path out of the pandemic remains complicated. It also reflects the reality that contact-tracing programs in about half of U.S. states have been eliminated.

Britain ended contact tracing last week, while Denmark and Finland are among other nations that have scaled back the use of contact tracers. New York City announced on Tuesday that it was ending its main contact-tracing program in late April and moving toward treating the coronavirus as another manageable virus.

“This is a big change,” Crystal Watson, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said in an interview on Tuesday. “It does reflect what’s already happening in states and localities, particularly with Omicron. There was no way contact tracing could keep up with that. Many of the cases are not being reported, so there’s no way of knowing the incidence.”

The original goal of contact tracing in the United States was to reach people who have spent more than 15 minutes within six feet of an infected person and ask them to quarantine at home voluntarily for two weeks even if they test negative. The aim was to reduce transmission while Americans who tested positive monitored themselves for symptoms during their isolation. Case investigation is used to identify and understand cases, clusters and outbreaks that require health department intervention.

But from the start of the pandemic, states and cities struggled to detect the prevalence of the virus because of spotty and sometimes rationed diagnostic testing and long delays in getting results.

Now the C.D.C. is pushing health departments to focus solely on high-risk settings, like long-term care facilities, jails and prisons, and shelters. Many immunocompromised Americans, though, feel left behind by the lifting of precautions and restrictions across the country. ...