Good morning. Welcome to Axios today. It's Tuesday, January 11th. I'm Nyla Budi. Here's

what you need to know today. The healthcare worker shortage by the numbers. Plus,

why the James Webb Space Telescope is such a big deal. But first, understanding the

value of COVID case counts is today's one big thing.

COVID case numbers have been breaking records in the last few weeks here in the U.S.

But death and hospitalizations are still largely down. That got us thinking how useful are

case counts actually in understanding where we are right now in this wave of the pandemic.

That's the question I wanted to pose to Dr. Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins

University's COVID-19 Testing Insights Initiative. And she's with us now. Hi, Dr. Nuzzo.

Hi there. Thank you for joining us. Are case counts useful at this point? I actually had a

listener ask me this last week why we were referencing case counts in Florida without talking

about hospitalizations or death rates. What do you think? Case counts are still useful,

but in epidemiology, it's rare that anyone measure tells you everything you need to know

and how we use cases has changed throughout the course of this pandemic. So what's different now?

We are in some places, particularly the high vaccination coverage areas, seeing hospitalizations

and deaths, not rising as steeply with the case numbers that are rising quite steeply. But in other

places, the hospitalizations and deaths are a bit too linked to cases that I would like to see

at the stage of the pandemic. So we look at it particularly because it's one of the first

measures that we get, hospitalizations and deaths tend to lag. And just seeing that we're on the

upswing tells us what to potentially expect in hospitalizations and deaths, even if the increase

isn't as steep as it would have been earlier in the pandemic. And at this point in the pandemic,

people also have a lot more access to home testing. But those numbers may not be actually

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