Here’s How to Plan More COVID-Safe Holiday Gatherings: Websites That Show Virus Grades in Wastewater
By Betsy Ladyzhets
Wastewater samples, such as these collected in San Jose, Calif., can show rising levels of the COVID-causing virus in a community.
Dai Sugano/MediaNews Group/The Mercury News via Getty Images
Since the start of the COVID pandemic, scientists have tracked the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, which causes the disease, by analyzing water samples from public sewer systems. This practice, called wastewater monitoring, is a vital way to monitor the spread of the virus. Research has shown that coronavirus concentrations in wastewater rise and fall with COVID degrees in the community. Surveillance has been particularly useful over the past year, as most public health agencies no longer count the number of people who test positive for COVID. Many agencies now use wastewater data to establish protective guidelines, says Amy Kirthrough, manager of the wastewater surveillance program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Experts say if you’re looking to avoid COVID in the holiday season, it’s worth taking a dip in the sewage pool. But on the internet, knowledge of wastewater for a specific network can be difficult to locate and also to understand. Here’s how to get it.
To begin, locate the nearest wastewater analysis array. The information it contains will show what’s happening with COVID in your community, says Dustin Hill, an environmental knowledge scientist at Syracuse University who works on New York state’s wastewater monitoring program. First, check out the CDC’s Testing Map, which includes more than 1,000 in all 50 states and Washington, D. C. He can also locate wastewater testing nearby on the websites of Biobot Analytics, a wastewater testing startup, and WastewaterSCAN, an educational project, either of which generate knowledge from a multitude of sewer systems.
In addition to those national panels, many state and local public fitness agencies and educational research teams post wastewater knowledge on their own Web sites, says Colleen Naughton, an environmental engineer at the University of California, Merced. Naughton manages the CovidPoops19 dashboard, which shows where wastewater testing is taking place around the world. She can use this dashboard to “find out if there’s a wastewater monitoring formula near you,” she says. Local websites are sometimes more up-to-date than CDC websites and are designed with express communities. in mind. For example, New York State’s wastewater dashboard is “locally tailored,” Hill says.
If your neighborhood sewer formula checks for SARS-CoV-2, “nearby communities can be informative,” Kirby says. This means you can search for verification sites in cities or counties near you or even verify data for your entire state. The CDC recently introduced a new dashboard that stores state-level wastewater figures. This dashboard uses a new metric called “wastewater viral activity level,” which represents how much recent viral measurements deviate from old measurements at the same control site. In the future, CDC plans to provide similar levels of activity for counties and for other diseases, such as influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), Kirby says.
To perceive wastewater trends, ask yourself two questions: First, what are the existing degrees of SARS-CoV-2 in your community’s wastewater?For example, WastewaterSCAN panel rates check site effects as “high,” “medium,” or “low. “The research is based on how their existing viral levels compare to measurements accumulated over the previous year, says Marlene Wolfe, an environmental microbiologist at Emory University and one of the project’s lead scientists. Second, are the trends of the past few weeks increasing, decreasing, or stable?Such adjustments accommodate the accumulation or minimize the spread of COVID in the community, Hill says.
After checking your community’s or state’s wastewater numbers, it’s also important to look at regional and national data because a COVID surge that starts in one part of the country is likely to reach other areas later. The CDC’s new dashboard offers regional and national trends, as do Biobot’s and WastewaterSCAN’s websites. But those trends might look different across the three dashboards. Different data reporting schedules, differences in sewage testing procedures and differences in the communities represented by those national trends all contribute to inconsistencies. WastewaterSCAN is skewed toward California, for example, with more testing sites there than in any other area. That’s because the project is based at Stanford University, which is in that state. But the three national sites generally converge on trend direction.
However, the panels don’t tell you what to do when the races are the best in your community. “It’s such a private choice and we have such a tolerance for risk,” Kirby says. But their roles can simply show up with a mask in public spaces, test before gatherings and take extra precautions when traveling, experts say. For fitness agencies, higher levels of illness in wastewater can prompt public warnings or cause agencies to open more vaccination clinics.
While scientists agree on the price tag of wastewater monitoring, those projects face long-term challenges. The CDC’s program will require new investments after 2025, and local varies widely depending on the interest and resources of state health departments. More studies are needed to better understand how wastewater measurements also respond to adjustments in network suitability.
Despite the challenges, many experts remain confident that wastewater surveillance will be a permanent component of the public health system. “Not only is there a pressing need to continue to monitor COVID, but there’s also a lot of very compelling evidence that this procedure is very useful for other diseases as well,” Wolfe says.
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