More than two years after the first Long COVID patients drew attention to their condition, the federal government’s response to this crisis has been frustratingly slow, experts say. If you are a patient, advocate, caregiver, researcher or someone else connected to the Long COVID community, we want to hear your thoughts on these questions.

In a new study, Columbia University researchers have identified coronavirus mutations in New York City wastewater that seem to appear when severe disease rates begin to rise. The findings may pinpoint subtle, understated variants in the pandemic that are affecting day-to-day outcomes, including hospitalization and death, without doctors noticing.

MuckRock, the USA TODAY network and the Documenting COVID-19 project, a pandemic-era journalism project funded by Columbia University’s Brown Institute for Media Innovation, won first place in the 2022 National Headliners Awards for online pandemic coverage or project.

The Documenting COVID-19 project surveyed 19 state and local health agencies, as well as scientists who work on wastewater sampling, to learn about the challenges they’re facing. We found that many states are months away, if not longer, from being able to use wastewater data to guide public health decisions, even as the rise of an omicron subvariant, BA.2, looms. Meanwhile, the CDC’s highly shared wastewater surveillance dashboard is a work in progress, and is difficult to interpret for users who might hope to follow the trends in their areas.

Four Michiganders — a taxidermist, his wife and two mink farm employees — were infected with a unique coronavirus strain connected to minks, leading Michigan health officials and the CDC to conclude they likely contracted the first known U.S. cases of so-called animal-to-human virus “spillover.”