The Department of Defense apparently has cut its update of COVID-19 case numbers, Military.com reported.
The DOD had been publishing them weekly since July 2021, according to the site.
The department appeared to be joining more than a dozen states that have reduced their COVID-19 data output to once or twice per week amid a decline of infections across the country,
The DOD had been releasing information three times per week during the pandemic's first year, when states reported the data daily.
"There's been no decision not to report or to slim down our — the flow of information," Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said during a press conference Monday.
"We're still working on this very, very hard. And again, there's been no decision not to share that information."
Kirby added that 97.7% of active-duty personnel were fully vaccinated, 93.8% of the National Guard and Reserve forces had received at least one dose, and the department had administered more than 7 million shots.
"Nobody's doing any spiking of any footballs here. We know this pandemic is still ongoing, that the virus is still dangerous and deadly," Kirby said. "We're watching this every single day, and we're not afraid to make adjustments."
The DOD listed 608,650 COVID-19 cases overall, including 391,341 among U.S. service members. More than 680 people have died, including 93 troops, 414 civilian employees, 35 dependents, and 139 contractors, according to its published statistics.
Officials in March 2020 ordered individual military installations and combatant commands to cease publishing COVID-19 case numbers, citing concerns for operational security.
White House top medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said last week that Americans could face more lockdowns as an omicron subvariant known as BA.2 spreads throughout the country.
Fauci said the subvariant, which has gained momentum in Europe and Asia, soon could appear in America. He suggested Americans should "be able to pivot and go back to any degree of mitigation that is commensurate with what the situation is."
"We can't just say, We're done. We're going to move on," Fauci said on CNN. "We've got to be able to be flexible because we're dealing with a dynamic situation. The overall mortality is actually down. It's a very interesting situation where the cases are going up, but it does not, at this point in time, appear to be any degree of severity."
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