Celebrations continue amid newest COVID-19 guidance, but experts say testing is still important

Here’s a look at some of today’s COVID-19 news.

Revelers decked out in traditional purple, green and gold came out to party on Fat Tuesday in New Orleans’ first full-dress Mardi Gras since 2020. The fun includes back-to-back parades across the city and marches through the French Quarter and beyond, with masks against COVID-19 required only in indoor public spaces.

Parade routes are shorter than usual, because there aren’t enough police for the standard ones, even with officers working 12-hour shifts as they always do on Mardi Gras and the days leading up to the end of the Carnival season.

But with COVID-19 hospitalizations and case numbers falling worldwide and 92% of the city’s adults at least partly vaccinated, parades and other festivities are back on after a season without them.

Hundreds of thousands of devotees crowded a revered Hindu temple in Nepal’s capital for a festival on Tuesday as coronavirus cases decline and life returns to normal.

Around a million devotees were expected to visit the temple to Hindu god Shiva on Shivaratri, one of Nepal’s most cherished festivals.

Temples, schools and markets have begun to reopen in recent weeks as the number of COVID-19 cases declines. On Monday, just 180 new infections were reported, down from a peak of over 9,000 per day in January.

Most adults in the United States are getting back to some degree of pre-pandemic normalcy, but they’re divided over concerns and expectations for what’s next.

Three surveys conducted in February — from the Kaiser Family Foundation, Axios/Ipsos and the Washington Post in collaboration with ABC News — asked adults to assess the current state of the pandemic in the United States.

Only a third of adults think the virus is “completely” or “mostly” under control, according to the Post/ABC survey. But most think the worst is behind them, the KFF survey found.

As the United States emerges from the Omicron wave, Covid-19 testing has slowed to a fraction of what it was at the beginning of the year.

In mid-January, as daily case counts reached their peak, about 2.5 million tests were processed each day in the United States. Now, there are about 670,000 tests coming through each day, according to data from the US Department of Health and Human Services.

“Testing, especially as the Omicron wave goes down, does not lose its relevance,” epidemiologist Dr. Michael Mina emphasized. “Testing is how we see the virus. We can’t see it if we do not test.”

Read more of the day’s COVID news here:

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