December 21, 2023
4 min read
Here’s how to plan COVID-safer holiday get-togethers, using websites that show viral levels in wastewater
Wastewater samples, such as these collected in San Jose, Calif., can show rising levels of the COVID-causing virus in a community.
Since the start of the COVID pandemic, scientists have tracked the disease-causing coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 by testing water samples from public sewer systems. This practice, called wastewater surveillance, has become an important way to monitor the virus’s spread. Research has shown that coronavirus concentrations in sewage go up and down with community COVID levels. The surveillance has been particularly valuable in the past year because most public health agencies are no longer counting how many people test positive for COVID. Many agencies now use information from wastewater to inform safety guidance, says Amy Kirby, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s wastewater surveillance program.
Experts say that if you’re looking to avoid COVID this holiday season, it’s worth wading into the wastewater pool. But on the Internet, wastewater data for a particular community can be hard to find and hard to understand as well. Here’s how to get started.
To begin, find the wastewater testing site closest to where you live. Data from that site will show what’s happening with COVID in your community, says Dustin Hill, an environmental data scientist at Syracuse University, who works on New York State’s wastewater surveillance program. First, check the CDC’s map of testing sites, which includes more than 1,000 sites across all 50 states and Washington, D.C. You may also find nearby wastewater testing sites on the websites of Biobot Analytics, a wastewater testing start-up, and WastewaterSCAN, an academic project, both of which generate data from hundreds of sewer systems.
In addition to these national dashboards, many state and local public health agencies and university research groups share wastewater data on their own websites, says Colleen Naughton, an environmental engineer at the University of California, Merced. Naughton runs the CovidPoops19 dashboard, which shows where wastewater testing is happening around the world. You can use this dashboard to “find if there’s wastewater monitoring near you,” she says. Local websites are often updated more frequently than the CDC’s and designed with specific communities in mind. For example, New York…
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