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Graph showing level of Covid, flu and RSV in US wastewater systems, by city

publichealth.verily.com

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Re: Graph showing level of Covid, flu and RSV in US wastewater systems, by city

#11

Post by larsiny »

arikr wrote: post #2

See also: https://biobot.io/data/

Oddly, this site doesn't report for my local counties that are listed as having submitted data to CDC's NWSS (King and Pierce counties in Washington State).

I wonder if the more "popular" counties are pay-walled or something?

EDIT: According to the site, "County Selection: Counties associated with each location were provided by our sampling partners, and correspond to the primary county served by each sampling location. In the county-level section we highlight a subset of counties which had at least 21 weeks of data and whose sampling locations represented at least 10,000 individuals, as well as the primary counties of our sampling partners in the Biobot Network."

So I'm curious what other factors are excluding the largest (by population) counties in Washington?

Re: Graph showing level of Covid, flu and RSV in US wastewater systems, by city

#13

Post by TaylorAlexander »

I am continually surprised at how many people don’t wear masks at places like the grocery store even as cases are rising. I got covid over the summer and it was horrible! I lost two weeks of work which was a lot of money to lose, missed multiple dates with my partner I would have really enjoyed and felt totally isolated. Then I felt fatigue and brain fog for months afterwards. Afterwards I got the bivalent vaccine so I do feel more protected now, but there’s still a risk.

Wear a mask and wash your hands folks!

Re: Graph showing level of Covid, flu and RSV in US wastewater systems, by city

#14

Post by jdadj »

ropeladder wrote: post #7

Wastewater surveillance is a pretty crazy technology. My neighbor works on projects using it for wildlife tracking, and they can get startling amounts of information about what is going on in a given watershed. What (e.g endangered) animals are present, what animals humans are eating, etc. And all the way down to the viral level, obviously.

I’m confused. How is wastewater from endangered animals ending up in the sewage system? Surely they’re not using toilets…

Re: Graph showing level of Covid, flu and RSV in US wastewater systems, by city

#15

Post by dmix »

I remember during the tail end of the pandemic someone posted a link to a big spike in wastewater COVID testing in our city's sewers. So I decided to pay close attention to the COVID test rates/hospitalizations for the next 2 months. But I never ended up seeing any correlation. The trendline stayed stagnant, before declining as it did everywhere else.

I know that's a one-off non-scientific example, but it made me wonder if it's occasionally just noise in a small sample set? Certainly useful but maybe not always easy to translate/project into IRL illness rates.

Re: Graph showing level of Covid, flu and RSV in US wastewater systems, by city

#16

Post by londons_explore »

jdadj wrote: post #14
ropeladder wrote: post #7

Wastewater surveillance is a pretty crazy technology. My neighbor works on projects using it for wildlife tracking, and they can get startling amounts of information about what is going on in a given watershed. What (e.g endangered) animals are present, what animals humans are eating, etc. And all the way down to the viral level, obviously.

I’m confused. How is wastewater from endangered animals ending up in the sewage system? Surely they’re not using toilets…

There is always a little that drains in... Often these tests are done on river water too.

And PCR tests are super sensitive.

Re: Graph showing level of Covid, flu and RSV in US wastewater systems, by city

#17

Post by mistrial9 »

spacefracas wrote: post #6

It's Suspect that adjacent cities have such divergent trends. For example Novato vs San Rafael CA. Novato: http://publichealth.verily.com/#Novato,%20CA:SARS-CoV-2 San Rafael: http://publichealth.verily.com/#San%20Rafael,%20CA:SARS-CoV-...

an eighty year old in either place may rarely talk to anyone, while a commuting Dad with kids in pre-school may get involuntarily exposed every single week. There is some truth to geographic locality for disease, but there is also Car Culture in the USA.

Re: Graph showing level of Covid, flu and RSV in US wastewater systems, by city

#18

Post by rajup »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #13

I am continually surprised at how many people don’t wear masks at places like the grocery store even as cases are rising. I got covid over the summer and it was horrible! I lost two weeks of work which was a lot of money to lose, missed multiple dates with my partner I would have really enjoyed and felt totally isolated. Then I felt fatigue and brain fog for months afterwards. Afterwards I got the bivalent vaccine so…

Masks are unlikely to have protected you much unless it’s a tight fitting n95 mask worn around the clock. This topic has been beaten to death on here, not sure why people continue to cling on to masks as anything other than security theater.

Re: Graph showing level of Covid, flu and RSV in US wastewater systems, by city

#20

Post by aaroninsf »

dmix wrote: post #15

I remember during the tail end of the pandemic someone posted a link to a big spike in wastewater COVID testing in our city's sewers. So I decided to pay close attention to the COVID test rates/hospitalizations for the next 2 months. But I never ended up seeing any correlation. The trendline stayed stagnant, before declining as it did everywhere else. I know that's a one-off non-scientific example, but it made me won…

Depending on when/where that was during the pandemic,

unless you were able to find background positivity rates (the best proxy for community infection rates), published test rate data was always noisy and after testing mandates were relaxed became all but literally meaningless,

and there is also an apples/oranges issues trying to correlate hospitalization rates as vaccination and different waves moved through (among other factors).

Getting a clear picture has been devilishly hard...

...and about 100x harder than it needed to be, if we had competent governance involved from the beginning. E.g. OSHA and CDC mandating comprehensive ongoing PCR at scale; schools doing weekly testing regardless of symptoms, with consistent reporting standards, etc ad nausuem.

Sigh.

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