Wastewater & a possible peak passed

[M_T]

Some indications may show that some areas may have hit the peak in Omicron infections and are on the way down, but still much higher than the previous peaks:

Boston wastewater is showing a clear decline in COVID detection (not down to pre-Omicron levels).
Likewise, Santa Clara County wastewater is showing a flattening or a decline.  The Palo Alto treatment site shows a clear decline.

HOWEVER, it looks like virtually all of the country is still on the way up (including Sacramento & Monterey) according to wastewater measurements.

Climbing:  Houston ; Wisconsin ; Ottawa ; Colorado ; Ohio ;
Mixed bag:  a variety of sites around the SF part of Northern California (as measured by a Stanford project, SCAN) including one that is at Stanford (Codiga), which is in a clear decline (peaked Jan 2)

This is NOT the time to relax.  Prudence would be to wait a few weeks before going out into crowds to make sure things are really getting down to the levels that we used to know as crazy high levels of infection.

As I looked around at wastewater numbers, I saw a few sites that had no real increase in virus signature in their wastewater even up to early January.  So I expect there will be pockets that will burn later than the areas already starting to come down.

Other interesting COVID wastewater sites
UCSD COVID dashboard shows exposure locations and shows a campus map with wastewater indications for each building.
Missouri shows variants detected each week in wastewater around the state.

Worldwide links to wastewater dashboards.  (there are far fewer than I expected.  Lots of places doing some measurements, but not posting them consistently.  The CDC is trying to collect the data and post it, but it is not ready yet.)

[ChrisGreene]

This may have been obvious to you, but I just noticed that the narrow "width" of the peak is actually narrower for a county or wastewater system than for a state or country. This makes sense because the start times of the wave differ.

[M_T]

I looked back at these stats today.  Nationwide, some areas have not yet showed a downturn, but  more have some downturn.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the wastewater at Stanford peaked on January 2, then reached a relatively low on January 15, and has clearly gone back up.  As I understand it, classes start again on January 24.  Perhaps this reflects infected students and staff returning to campus.

Stanford shutdown attendance at indoor activities (primarily athletic) but has announced a January 28 resumption of public attendance at such activities.   I'm a bit worried that they'll find that with students back, the infections will again go up.  It will be frustrating if Stanford has to back down from their announced resumption, but it may be worse if they allow people to congregate in bleachers.

[Hurlburt88]

I am watching carefully! WIll be really interesting to see trends in the next few weeks

[M_T]

It seems a lot of government officials and organizations (and truckers) believe the curve of infections will continue to drop and are relaxing restrictions on the most infectious and widespread disease, before infections are down to the pandemic levels at their worst before two months ago.  (No, never mind the current death rate.)

It is reassuring to see the numbers at the Biobot site.  The levels are down, but (as I said), still higher than most of the peaks prior to two months ago.

In addition, I found these numbers interesting.  The CDC's numbers on relative frequency of variants is suspect to me, because they are taken from a minuscule number of samples compared to infection levels.  Those numbers are vulnerable to selection biases.   The sewage data seems a much better barometer of the relative number of variants (or, perhaps the amount of virus shed into sewage).

Sample date     Jan 19      Feb 2
Region     Omicron   Delta  Delta
Nationwide  96.9%    3.1%    1.6%
Midwest     97.3%    2.7%    1.1%
Northeast   96.0%    4.0%    2.2%
South       97.2%    2.8%    1.6%
West        99.1%    0.9%    0.5%

Frankly, I was surprised to see that much Delta.  I had hoped that Omicron would squash Delta into absolute 0.
And, it is interesting to speculate why the West has 1/3 the level of Delta relative to Omicron versus the rest of the country.

I am disappointed to see that many of the places they were monitoring have no recent samples.

[M_T]

The CDC now shows wastewater levels.