The pandemic must be over. This trusted source has stopped counting COVID cases.

The COVID-19 pandemic is over — at least according to one influential group of experts.

Johns Hopkins University, a pioneer in the tracking and reporting of coronavirus cases and deaths, has stopped updating its once indispensable and widely viewed dashboard, it announced in a statement.

The university wound down its online Coronavirus Resource Center late last week. The go-to dashboard for tracking cases and deaths in real time around the nation and the world — closely watched even by federal and state officials — was created in the early days of the pandemic, before many Americans had even heard of COVID-19.

But three years later, the Baltimore university is ceasing its data collection and reporting, though the existing data — gathered between Jan. 22, 2020, and March 10, 2023 — will remain available.

It’s yet another milestone as the pandemic finally nears its official end.

“After three years of round-the-clock work building and maintaining a 24/7 global resource, we have reached the appropriate time to close this chapter of our response and look to other ways to keep the public safe and informed,” Lauren Gardner, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering, said in the statement.

Gardner added: “But if we’re needed again, we stand ready and willing to serve.”

The site was a massive collaboration involving a number of experts from across the university. The site received more than 2.5 billion views and more than 200 billion data requests worldwide, the statement said.

However, Johns Hopkins said beginning in 2021, “U.S. states and counties began to consistently reduce the amount of publicly reported data—a shift that led the CRC in September 2022 to discontinue hourly reporting for testing and vaccine data.”

State reporting has continued to decline, a concern among the Johns Hopkins experts, the statement said.

“The widespread use of at-home rapid tests has significantly diminished the utility and accuracy of case data,” Beth Blauer, associate vice provost for public sector innovation and CRC data lead, said in the statement. “The hospitalization data collected and reported by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is now the most reliable and complete data remaining for use in public health decisions and policymaking.

“This is valuable, but insufficient to fully track and understand the pandemic; we are concerned about the persistent, across-the-board declines in the quality and availability of COVID-19 data.”

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Spencer Kent may be reached at skent@njadvancemedia.com.