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Counting coronavirus cases just isn’t what it used to be.

It’s long been known that many coronavirus infections go unreported. Then the omicron variant blasted off the charts earlier this year — just as rapid, at-home tests became more commonly used (with their positives often going uncounted).

Now state health officials are changing course. When evaluating new public health actions, the state is pushing a renewed focus on tracking severe illness, hospital capacity, deaths and new variants.

That’s despite a . Because the increase hasn’t yet translated to an increase in severe illness or deaths — and omicron’s infectious subvariant, BA.2, appears to be fairly mild — keeping track of individual cases is becoming less important, state Secretary of Health Dr. Umair A. Shah said in a news briefing.

“Our focus is on hospitalizations, which remains flat and markedly less than what we were seeing in the peak of omicron,” Shah said.